Discover Your Core Value for Delivering Happiness

Learn how you can review the “highs” and
“lows” of your life to discover your core values
and what’s worth living and working for!

Dave Logan and Tony Hsieh

“Mountains and Valleys”

The Process to Discover Your Core Values

This is the 10-15 minute process Tony Hsieh talked about in a recent event promoting his book Delivering Happiness. We diagrammed the results from Tony’s own “Mountains and Valleys” journey below and list the core values that he came up with.

It’s no secret that Zappos has built a world class company where their company core values drive their culture, brand, and business strategies. (read the list of Zappos Core Values). Though Tony has a slightly different set of personal core values, they are very complementary.

Two Types of Core Values

  • Individual Core Values: The individual core values of people within a company or group.
  • Tribal Core Values: The collective values of the tribe generally recognized and aligned on by the group.

The “Mountains and Valleys” process can be used by employees, team members, and anyone participating in a situation where they want to identify their Personal Core Values. It can also be used in a company or group initiative to identify and align on a set of Tribal Core Values.

Contact CultureSync about doing a “Mountains and Valleys” exercise with your team, department, or entire organization.


Results

Tony Hsieh’s Core Values that Deliver Happiness

  1. Participate creatively in something that requires more than just you alone to succeed;
    the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
  2. Seek out tribal (level) connectedness; this is where the spiritual resides.
  3. Live with passion.
  4. Have vision.
  5. Only when you are totally free can you be the best of yourself.
  6. Fight inertia—seek meaning in every activity.
  7. Meet and treat people with the philosophy of PLUR.
  8. Experience matters more than things.

Tony Hsieh’s Major Milestone Events in Life (Charted) – the numbers with each event correspond to a core value listed above

Acknowledgments:

The chart above was created by the following people from reading the events of Tony’s life written about in Delivering Happiness:

  • Laurie Parker, USC Executive MBA program (analysis)
  • Jack Bennett, CultureSync (presentation)