I had a good friend text me in August asking me how I celebrated “the big day.”

I asked him if he would mind clarifying since I didn’t have the slightest clue what he was referring to. He responded with a screenshot of an annually recurring event in his calendar titled Jarred quits investment banking.

I appreciated the humor and thoughtfulness of the gesture given how familiar he had been with the triumphs and tribulations that characterized my experience as an investment banker. But beyond making me chuckle, it got me thinking about what my decision to leave my Wall Street cubicle in pursuit of greener pastures represented in the broader context of the journey (or dance) that is the adventure of my life. It also got me thinking about the role that values play in mediating actions and outcomes.

So here goes.

If (1) our values are the rules that we use to decide how to act and (2) how we act and what we do dictates where we go then (3) our values determine what we ultimately become.

One caveat. Our values only determine what we become to the extent we embody them. Unembodied values are nothing more than ideas — figments of our imagination. And while imagination is great, it alone will not get us where we want to go.

Quick disclaimer: in the coming paragraphs, I plan on getting metaphorical about the metaphysical (and making several bad puns). So if that’s not your thing, consider this your lifeline. If that is your thing, hop in and buckle up, let’s go for a ride.

If we are the drivers of our cars, then our values are the GPS systems (ideally) propelling us towards the worthiest of all destinations — the truest version of ourselves. The road ahead will certainly be treacherous, but as the ones sitting behind the wheel, there appear to be a few things we can do to try to maximize our chances of a successful road trip (life). I’m going to talk about two.

(1) The first is to recognize that we, and we alone, are the drivers of our cars–the sovereign and autonomous determiners of our destinies. And while we are sure to encounter many hailstorms and unexpected detours, we must acknowledge that there will only ever be one person wrangling the steering wheel, stepping on the gas pedal, and pumping the brakes.

(2) The second is to continuously assess the instructions that our GPS is spewing at us–ensuring that the values dictating our decisions are guiding us in a direction we deem worth heading towards.

The art of living then lies in (1) internalizing our role as the one, true chooser of our choices and (2) wielding the almighty faculty of choice to determine when we should continue on our current trajectory (abiding by the latest GPS directions) and when we should recalibrate (charting a new course towards truer pastures).

Any success we can hope to achieve in either of these realms (establishing a sense of agency and making decent decisions) will largely depend on the questions we ask (or don’t ask) ourselves. After all, the unexamined life is not worth living.

It is not sufficient that we simply do things. Simply doing things is nothing more than wandering. And while I am not opposed to using wandering as a GPS calibration tool (not all who wander are lost), I am opposed to using it as the core navigation strategy.

When we find ourselves consistently doing things, it is important that we ask ourselves where we might end up (and who / what we might become) if we continue to do these things. And once we have an understanding of what that place (and person) might look like, we must then ask ourselves if we have any desire to arrive there.

I say “any” desire because desires are tricky–they’re not always our own.

We have a peculiar tendency to borrow desires from others (and then think that we didn’t). This tendency leads far too many good soldiers to spend their lives working at jobs they hate so they can buy things they don’t need in order to impress people they don’t like — a modern-day tragedy.

There are many kinds of dangerous desires, but the most dangerous by far are the borrowed ones that we don’t think are borrowed.

Figuring out what we truly value / desire is hard. It is tempting to look for shortcuts — to see what others did to get where they wanted to go — and then try to follow suit. And while that is not an unequivocally bad strategy, it tends to bring about a few issues.

The first is that we might not actually want to end up where the people whose desires we are borrowing ended up. We wouldn’t photocopy Jim’s MapQuest directions that he used on his road trip from San Bernardino to Portland and expect it to get us from Houston to Jackson Hole. Yet many of us choose to live our lives according to values that aren’t true to ourselves in hopes we will arrive at a destination we deem worthy.