The Value Congruency Problem

I’ve been working with hundreds of highly rational individuals who expressed a need to find a path to greater self-actualization and expression, which can lead to deeper happiness and higher self-esteem.

I am talking about people who understand that their lives, their aspirations, and their values, manifested through the actualization of their visions, are nothing less than sacred.

But still, many of them are lost without a guide or a standard to define exactly which value pursuits will generate a sense of joy and self-expression and give them the psychological rewards they are after. Most of them have experienced many failed pursuits, resulting in frustration rather than pride, and a sense of “I thought I wanted it, just to realize that I didn’t, or that it didn’t bring me happiness.”

In my Happiness Team Workshops, after we go through an extensive process of defining, validating, organizing, and prioritizing each participant’s “Value Galaxy,” we reach the point where each participant needs to define their “Spotlight Value,” the value that is central to improving their well-being and happiness.

This is one of my first versions of my Value Galaxy

After participants detail the Spotlight Value they want to focus on, be it work-, relationship-, health-, or rejuvenation-related, the team is asked to provide feedback. To my surprise, over several years of running those workshops, in most cases, the team’s reaction has been negative in most cases. In those cases, the feedback was that something was off about the Spotlight Value, and they didn’t truly believe achieving this value would lead the individual in the “hot seat” to optimal levels of self-esteem and happiness.

Here is one concrete example: Barry, a successful lawyer who turned to entrepreneurship, pitched a Spotlight Value focused on launching a new company offering specific security services. He was excited about this opportunity, which meant partnering with a colleague who was an expert in the field. After describing the benefits of pursuing this value, the team gave negative feedback. “I don’t buy that this is what you truly want,” said one participant. “This opportunity doesn’t integrate with everything I know about you so far from your Value Galaxy,” said another.

Barry was flabbergasted. He didn’t understand the feedback, and he couldn’t see the reason for it.

In the next week’s meeting, and after introspecting about the feedback he got, Barry said with teary eyes, “Thank you, guys. I think you just saved me a decade of misguided pursuit that wouldn’t have led to the kind of joy and happiness I am looking for. To be honest, those types of mistakes are what led me to the Happiness Team in the first place.”

What was going on? Why would a smart, successful professional go through a whole process of defining his values only to make the same mistake again?

After much thinking, I’ve come to call this problem: The Value Congruency Problem.

The Congruence of Who I Am and What I Want

The root cause of Barry’s problem was a lack of congruency between his identity and the values he chose to pursue. This is a form of integrity gap between one’s “valuer identity” and the values one chooses to pursue.

Take the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” From everything we know about him, it is clear that Roark’s attraction to architecture is fully integrated into his identity and personality. In contrast, Peter Keating is clearly suffering from a lack of integrity which, in his case, is a downstream problem stemming from an inability to value properly.

My point is that given one’s identity or personality, a range of values would fall under the category of high-congruence, while others will clearly fall under the low, or even no-congruence, category. Think of anyone you know well and project the types of work that will fall into the high-congruence and no-congruence ranges. If you offered me a job as a project manager, responsible for making sure every “t” is crossed and every “i” is dotted, I’d get depressed just thinking about it. But if you offer me a job that requires creativity, non-linear thinking, and a healthy dose of chaos, I’d thrive in it.

Here is a visual that helps me concretize this:

Why would some types of work suit me while others don’t? Because of who I am. Because of the combination of my nature and nurture. My temperament, my “hardware”, and the character and the type of valuer I’ve nurtured over the years — my “software.”

Who am I?

Let’s define our terms. What is one’s identity or personality?

According to Cloninger’s Psychobiological Model of Temperament and Character, a personality can be divided into two main categories: Temperament and Character. Temperaments are biological and stable from birth, while Characters are shaped by experience, social growth, and one’s own behavioral and moral decisions. The main value of this model is its recognition of the “Nature & Nurture” aspects of personality. Part is defined by biological characteristics (your “hardware”), and part is the creation of one’s own soul and character through numerous choices (your “software”).

Temperament: It is evident that every child has a specific nature as soon as they come out of their mother’s womb. Even identical twins share the same genetic makeup but do not develop the same personality (see leading research on this topic by Polmin & Daniels). Even in infants, we can observe specific temperament characteristics that distinguish individuals: their activity level, sensitivity and sensory thresholds, intensity, approach vs. withdrawal, adaptability, distractibility, persistence or attention span, regularity, and even overall mood. Although it is hard to infer the exact magnitude of the impact of one’s biological makeup on one’s value choices, it is clear that temperament has an effect on one’s preferences. The takeaway is that we need to identify, recognize, clarify, and distill specific biological tendencies we have, which cannot be reduced further than the statement “This is how I am.”

Achieving full alignment with one’s identity must account for the biological aspects of one’s personality. We all have specific traits, proclivities, and tendencies that are part of our identities and can already be identified in newborns.

Character: Beyond the given “hardware,” most of one’s personality is defined by thousands of conscious and subconscious decisions that accumulate into the cognitive and emotional processes we call character. From a very early age of conceptual thinking, we begin making conscious choices that serve as inputs to an ongoing feedback and programming loop, which defines our character and self-identity. We choose what to focus on, how to react to events, what habits to adopt, what beliefs and principles to subscribe to, and more.

I remember reading a great example about how a decision made by a toddler can affect their self-perception (it was part of an essay called “Happiness Skills” by Edith Packer). The example describes how this toddler processes the fact that a friend he was playing with decided to leave and play with someone else. In his mind, he can regard this incident as proof of his lack of attractiveness, social skills, or character. On the other hand, he can choose to regard this as a mere preference of his friend to do something else, and an opportunity to play by himself or seek another playmate. Regardless of the direction the child chooses, that choice will shape the child’s character and self-esteem.

The sum of this self-evaluation will affect how a person chooses to think and act. “A human being is the most complex entity on earth,” writes Ayn Rand, and this is true by orders of magnitude from every other creature known to us. The level of complexity of a human is hard to grasp, but just like a good writer, we all, either when evaluating others or ourselves, have to essentialize one’s characteristics to be able to reduce them to a graspable whole.

Our character is malleable and could be reshaped in meaningful ways over time. Our free will and our ability to focus and direct our minds toward a specific aspect of our character allow us to identify, evaluate, and consciously change our beliefs, principles of action, habits, and emotional responses. Our free will to choose how we integrate and process experiences, emotionally and cognitively, means we are free to alter our personality at any point in our lives. This means that our personality could change in both major and minor ways.

We all change over time, including our character, our situation, our life stage, the scope of our vision, and our desires. Desires and wants come and go; some diminish over time, some are satiated and lose attractiveness, while others grow and intensify. This means that our character and our desires are moving targets and require constant evaluation, alignment, and adjustment.

But regardless of that fact, one’s character has a specific identity at any given point in time, and one’s ability to achieve happiness and fulfillment depends, in part, on the congruence between one’s personality and the values one chooses to pursue.

Why Look for High Value-Congruence?

How can one ensure that their pursuits will yield self-esteem and happiness? The first step is to prove the nature of value pursuits that actually yield high levels of self-esteem, non-contradictory joy, and a sense of deep happiness and fulfillment.

Deriving from Ayn Rand’s view of values and the art of valuing, it is clear that first and foremost, a value pursuit should be rational and objectively life-serving. This is a prerequisite that I am not going to discuss, and for further reading, I’d refer you to Rand’s book The Virtue of Selfishness.

But to go even deeper into the meaning of a value pursuit’s rationality and objectivity of chosen values, I’d like to put forward a hypothesis:

The psychological benefits derived from pursuing and achieving values depend not only on the rationality and objective worth of those values, but also on their congruence with the individual's personality, authentic interests, desires, and capacities.

The congruence of a value with one’s personality is more likely to generate the desired outcomes for the following reasons:

• Intrinsic pleasure in the process. When a value pursuit is congruent with one's personality, the process itself is rewarding. Howard Roark enjoys doing architecture, solving the problems involved in erecting a building, not merely the finished product.

• Authentic competence and self-esteem. A congruent pursuit allows a person to exercise and develop capacities they personally value. Each genuine achievement can therefore become evidence to oneself: I am capable of doing something that matters to me. This creates a powerful connection between value pursuit, a sense of competence, and earned self-esteem.

• Independent self-evaluation. Deep, authentic values carry a sense of clarity which creates intrinsic, independent standards. When the standards governing a pursuit are one's own, one can judge one's progress internally and independently. Roark can tell a building is good even when others reject it because he applies his own standards.

To summarize, the reasons for seeking high value-congruence are that the level of enjoyment of the pursuit, the level of self-esteem derived from a pursuit, and the sense of independence and fulfillment are all dependent on the congruency of a value to the valuer.

How to Achieve High Value Congruence? Autognosis.

How does one ensure a high level of congruency between their personality and value pursuits?

Well, logically, this means a high level of clarity in the different elements involved: your identity, your values, and your circumstances. Here are the types of questions that can help gain clarity about those three elements:

1. Identity: Who am I? What defines me? What do I know about myself that is true over time? What characteristics do I possess? What are the common threads in my life that reflect the type of person and valuer that I am?

2. Interests and values: what attracts me? What do I find interesting and important? What types of work, relationships, and recreational activities do I find pleasurable and meaningful? Why? What do I genuinely, intrinsically want to achieve? What is a meaningful way to express myself? How can the common denominators of my values reflect on the type of valuer that I am? What brings me pleasure and self-esteem?

3. Circumstances: What is available and possible to me? What constraints do I have? What will be rational or irrational to go after? Which obstacles can I overcome, and which can I not? What can I achieve in the short or long term?

Those are the dimensions one should examine while deciding on which values and life goals to pursue.

As you can see, all of those questions are introspective and require a high level of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is what Autognosis is all about.

Autognosis is the systematic development of self-knowledge designed to create an alignment between one’s personality and the nature and hierarchy of one’s pursued values. The goal of Autognosis is to increase one’s Value Congruence for the purpose of increasing self-esteem and happiness.

Autognosis is dependent on the fields of philosophy and psychology. A proper philosophy, especially the field of ethics, should guide a person to choose rational and life-serving values in the proper context of his life’s circumstances. A proper psychology should help one evaluate distortions and biases in one’s thinking and emotional habits. The proper use of the insights enabled by Autognosis requires the prerequisite knowledge that one’s chosen values are ethical and aren’t the product of a distorted view of self.

I think that one’s ability to live a deep, meaningful life is directly dependent on one’s level of self-knowledge. This is my case for Autognosis (self-knowledge) as a discipline that should be taught, practiced, and discussed much more than we currently do. This discipline is based on purposeful introspective processes that should inform one’s value choices.

As Ayn Rand writes in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:

“If men identified introspectively their inner states one tenth as correctly as they identify objective reality, we would be a race of ideal giants. I ascribe ninety-five percent or more of all psychological trouble and personal tragedies to the fact that in the realm of introspection we are on the level where savages were (or lower) in regard to extrospection.”

The 4-Step Autognosis Process

I found that a chronological model for value pursuits is especially effective, as people I’ve worked with are required to go through several cycles of value pursuits to identify gaps and opportunities to optimize their value selections, and even to identify gaps in their psychology that need tending.

My proposed Autognosis model below includes a sequence of definitions, models, questions, answers, and practices that allow individuals to examine the quality and rationality of their chosen value pursuits.

The model includes 4 domains of knowledge, designed to cover the full cycle of:

1. Value Mapping

2. Value Selection

3. Value Pursuit

4. Value Monitoring & Harvesting

A successful model will enable individuals to gain clarity about their nature and identity as a valuer (this word needs to be formally added to the dictionary). It will help them map the potential values and goals they want to achieve and pursue, assess their congruence with their valuer identity, be effective in pursuing those values, and gauge their emotional responses during the pursuit. Lastly, a successful model will also increase clarity on methodologies for extracting the appropriate level and scope of self-esteem from value pursuits.

To learn more about the specifics of every part of this model, you can read my book “Secrets of a Passionate Life” or register for one of my upcoming workshops at taltsfany.com. You can also see this YouTube conversation about Autognosis.

Two people wake up in the same world on the same morning. One drawls with a sigh, “Another day.” The other throws the curtains wide and says aloud with a smile, “Another day!”

Same words, same sunrise, same set of bills on the counter, yet they live in two different universes.

Why?

Even in that small act of greeting the day, one is flexing the muscle that builds happiness. The other is letting it atrophy.

This “happiness muscle,” or “valuer muscle,” is the capacity to look at reality, notice what you’re attracted to, decide what to pursue, and then go for it. Like any muscle, it can be trained and strengthened.

Here are three strength-training exercises for building your happiness muscle.

Exercise 1: Check Your Worldview

Every one of us holds fundamental premises about the world, usually formed in early childhood and rarely examined thereafter. These fall somewhere on a spectrum between two extremes. Either the world is a place that can be understood, where effort tends to pay off and something interesting and meaningful waits around every corner—or it’s a place that’s rigged against you, where hope is naive, and the wise move is to keep your guard up.

You can call these opposing worldviews Opportunity vs. Threat, Benevolence vs. Malevolence, or Playground vs. Battleground. Whatever you call it, your view on this runs deep into the core of your personality and defines the boundaries of what you consider happiness and fulfillment to be.

Part of what makes this worldview or deep psychological premise so powerful is that it doesn’t even seem like a premise. It comes to feel like an observation or self-evident fact. The person who believes the world is hostile thinks he’s just being realistic. And sure enough, he can find plenty of evidence: the layoff, the betrayal, the headlines. The person who believes the world is benevolent and interesting has plenty of evidence, too: the new opportunity, the new friendship, the new place to explore.

At a certain point, your fundamental premise begins to shape what you pay attention to, creating a confirmation-bias feedback loop. If you don’t examine your worldview consciously and explicitly, you may continue to think you’re seeing evidence of it, rather than realizing that your worldview is determining what you regard as evidence.

For those with a battlefield mindset, this can be psychologically deadly—like being trapped in a soul-sucking Matrix. We’ve all met people like this. Or, rather, the husks of what were people. They stop even noticing what once attracted them or lit their minds with wonder, attraction, questions. They let their valuer muscles atrophy, making the achievement of happiness seem like a distant and impossible goal reserved for the naives.

Fortunately, this problem is fixable. Although it is one of the hardest things to do, we all have the capacity to reflect, examine, identify, and challenge even our most deeply held premises. Sometimes this requires the help of a good therapist trained in a rational method. But it’s possible. I’ve done it, and I discuss my journey in my book, where you can learn the steps to do it yourself.

If you’ve read this far, then you’ve already taken the very first step. Awareness is power. You now have a heightened awareness of the importance of your own fundamental premises.

So ask yourself: Am I value- or threat-oriented? If so, in which areas of my life do I tend to have this worldview or the other? What gains or losses do I incur due to this worldview in this area of my life?

A tip: I’ve found that many people tend to have a threat-oriented worldview when it comes to financial security, which explains their reluctance to take risks for a better career path (changing careers, starting a business, taking a more meaningful job that might pay less, etc.). Check if your relationship with money is tainted with overprotectiveness that distorts your view of what is possible and worthy of your time and effort.

That’s the first circuit of this valuer-muscle workout. If you want to up the intensity, then pull up your calendar right now and block an hour to reflect on and identify the content of your fundamental premises. There’s much more to say on that subject, and if you want to do this in a group setting, read more about my upcoming workshops.

But for now, we’re moving on to another key aspect of working out one’s valuer muscle.

Exercise 2: Reignite Your Wonder

What’s something you have fun learning about, whether or not a paycheck (or a grade) hangs on it? If nothing comes to mind, what would your answer have been at some other point in your life, whether childhood or later? What lit you up and raised questions you were eager to answer?

When our valuer muscles are warm, we’re more sensitive to what attracts us. Some aspects of the world are interesting and fascinating, and understanding the nature of those values is valuable. Every related fact becomes a key, and every question becomes a door.

In your mind’s eye, watch a child take apart a clock. Nobody assigned it or is grading it. The child simply wants to know how it works, and the doing is its own reward.

Now watch that same person fifteen years later, eyes glazed in a lecture hall, counting the minutes. What happened? Usually, somewhere along the way, learning stopped being a way of grasping the world and became a series of hoops set by someone else’s demands: memorize this, regurgitate that.

A rotten education system, coupled with a deteriorating culture, wreaks havoc on a child’s love of knowledge and exploration.

To the extent you lose the childish wonder to learn more about the world and the things you value, your capacity for happiness and fulfillment is diminished. But, fortunately, we can all rekindle that wonder by following the green lights of what attracts us.

Chances are that right now you already have a question you’d genuinely love to know the answer to. Often, these get buried under commitments and forgotten. But they’re rarely lost. Take a minute to recall or formulate a question that piques your curiosity.

Next, pick a time—today—to spend ten whole minutes—investigating the answer. During that time, be on the lookout for more than just that one answer. Look for the real gold: more questions. Your rabbit hole might lead to a dead end. Or it might lead to an enormous playground where you’d happily spend most of your time.

There’s a lot of treasure out there, and the hunt often is as fun as the find. So make some time today to rekindle your curiosity by learning something new.

Exercise 3: Get Lost in Your Creations

Knowledge is a guide to action, and it should empower creative pursuits. Understanding a drum groove is crucial to playing it yourself. Understanding how an entrepreneur built a business can fuel your own business pursuits. Understanding what moves people enables you to tell a story that moves them. The ultimate end of knowledge is value creation.

Of course, the primary arena for value creation—where most of us put most of our time—is work. We all crave fulfilling work, and I discuss more about how to get it here and in my book. But the goal of this exercise is more delimited: Act on some interesting piece of knowledge, whether it’s something you just learned, or an idea you’ve had kicking around for a while.

Failing to act on your knowledge builds stasis into your soul. It signals to yourself that you’re not the type of person who takes your own knowledge seriously, that you’re OK with the gap between where you are and the better place you’d like to be. It erodes self-esteem.

By contrast, turning knowledge into action—and I want to stress, I’m talking about knowledge here, not mere whims—builds self-esteem. It signals to yourself: I know better, and I want better. Or: I want this, and I’m willing to act to get it. Or: I’m curious, and my curiosity is worth satisfying.

Pick something small to start with. Buy the ingredients for the recipe you’ve been meaning to try, start writing the outline for the book, call the friend you’d like to catch up with, or tour the gym you’ve been thinking about joining.

The point of this exercise is to connect thought with action, to help you solidify that connection, and, ultimately, to make moving from one to the other second nature. That fluidity is perhaps the best indicator of a strong valuer muscle—and it’s key to achieving happiness.

The reward? Getting lost in your creation. Those magical stretches where it seems like time stands still, and you’re completely lost (or actually deeply found) in the doing. You raise your head and hours have gone by like minutes. Those are moments of meaning when the valuer in you is nourished, and the judge in the back of your head turns the self-esteem dial up a bit.

If you don’t currently have a career or a job that creates those moments for you, don’t stress. There is a whole methodology you can follow to make that happen one step at a time, without having to “quit and start something new” (which is what many whimsical decisions lead to). Write to me at tal@taltsfany.com if you’d like to share your situation and get some guidance.

PS: If you’d like to rebuild or exercise your valuer muscle by answering questions such as “Who Am I?” “What Do I Love?” “What Should I Pursue?” write to me at tal@taltsfany.com, and if you want to work with an accountability team of like-minded valuers, learn more about my Happiness Team Workshops.

Words have specific meanings. Unfortunately, capitalism is frequently misused by supporters and critics alike. Too often, what people defend or condemn is not free-market capitalism at all.

Although distinctions exist among capitalism, free enterprise, and free market, for the purposes of this essay, I use capitalism to mean free-market capitalism: an economic system based on private property, voluntary exchange, competition, freedom of entry and association, and freedom of contract—including wages negotiated without government-imposed minimums. Government’s role is that of a referee: protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and preventing force and fraud, not granting subsidies, bailouts, or special privileges.

Consider Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) and Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism (2017). Both criticize corporate power, political influence, and government favors for large businesses. On corporate welfare, I agree with their criticisms on economic and moral grounds. Why should taxpayers subsidize businesses they might never voluntarily support? Why should politically connected corporations receive special privileges? And why should businesses making poor decisions be rescued at taxpayers’ expense?

These are legitimate complaints. But why blame free-market capitalism for government interference with the competitive market process?

In a free market, businesses must satisfy customers to earn profits. Persistent losses can signal that resources would be better used elsewhere. Rather than rescuing failing firms with taxpayer money, the free-market perspective is to allow the market process to work. As I sometimes jokingly tell my students when explaining this principle, it’s time to say, “Bye-bye, die-die!” to businesses that fail to satisfy consumer needs. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Some call government favoritism crony capitalism. I dislike that expression because it still associates the problem with capitalism. Calling someone a “nice jerk” doesn’t change the fact that you’re calling that person a jerk. Likewise, attaching crony to capitalism leaves the impression that capitalism itself is the problem. Why not simply call it cronyism, corporate welfare, or government favoritism? The defining feature is political privilege, not voluntary exchange.

Another misconception is that defending capitalism means defending big business. Being pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. Free-market advocates defend competition and voluntary exchange, not every corporation or business decision.

Consider manufacturers demanding protective tariffs, corporations seeking exclusive tax incentives, or industries lobbying for regulations that discourage competitors. Rather than competing for customers, these businesses seek political favors. Economists call this rent-seeking. The greater the potential rewards from government favoritism, the stronger the incentive to pursue politicians rather than customers.

Interestingly, critics from opposing ideological perspectives sometimes agree about corporate welfare. Consider my former professor, the late free-market economist Walter E. Williams, and Robert Reich, a progressive political commentator and former US secretary of labor. In his PragerU video “Is Capitalism Moral?” Williams explained that voluntary market transactions are positive-sum games because both parties expect to benefit. By contrast, he described government programs such as farm subsidies, business bailouts, and food stamps as zero-sum games in which some benefit at the expense of others. Reich has similarly criticized corporate welfare for benefiting politically connected businesses at taxpayers’ expense. Although their economic philosophies differ considerably, both recognized problems associated with government favoritism.

Consider Amazon’s proposed second headquarters in New York City. In 2018, state and local officials offered Amazon an incentive package potentially worth approximately $3 billion, primarily through tax credits and other benefits tied to investment and job creation. Progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposed the deal, questioning why a wealthy corporation should receive preferential treatment while communities faced pressing public needs.

A free-market advocate would oppose the deal on different grounds: no business, large or small, should receive taxpayer-funded subsidies or special privileges. The objection is not merely that Amazon received benefits unavailable to other businesses; it’s that government should not grant such favors in the first place. Businesses should compete for customers’ dollars, not taxpayers’ dollars. Government should enforce the rules, not pick winners and losers.

Amazon abandoned its New York plans in February 2019, but the controversy illustrates how different economic philosophies can identify the same problem. One emphasizes inequality and public priorities; the other emphasizes competition and market discipline.

The disagreement extends beyond subsidies to the question of monopoly power. In one of his videos, John Stossel shows a clip of Robert Reich describing Amazon as a monopoly. Stossel then challenges that characterization, pointing out that consumers have alternatives, including Walmart, Target, and Alibaba. This raises an important question: Should government determine when a company has become “too big,” or should consumers determine which businesses succeed through their voluntary purchasing decisions?

A company’s size alone does not establish monopoly power, and size itself is never a justification for government intervention. From a free-market perspective, the relevant distinction is between a business that grows by satisfying customers and one that benefits from government-created barriers to competition. Likewise, voluntary mergers should not require government approval merely because officials believe the resulting company would be “too large.”

None of this means that free markets require the complete absence of government or that all corporate misconduct results from intervention. The crucial distinction is between government enforcing general rules that protect property rights, contracts, and voluntary exchange, versus government granting special privileges or interfering with voluntary business decisions, including mergers and acquisitions.

There is nothing inconsistent about criticizing corporate misconduct while defending free-market capitalism. Any politician claiming to support free markets should, to be philosophically consistent, oppose government intervention beyond protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and preventing force and fraud. That includes subsidies, bailouts, special privileges, and antitrust laws that interfere with voluntary market competition. Government should act as a referee, not determine which companies are “too big” or which businesses should be permitted to merge. Consumers—not politicians or bureaucrats—should determine which businesses succeed and how large they become. Unfortunately, politicians in both major parties routinely claim to support free markets while advocating policies that undermine them.

So the next time someone points to a corporate bailout, subsidy, or protectionist tariff as evidence that capitalism has failed, ask: Is this business succeeding because customers voluntarily support it, or because government granted it a special advantage?

If the problem is government favoritism, stop blaming capitalism. Call it what it is: cronyism.

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