What makes a person worthy? Having values and living by them. If you truly choose your values, even when you are under pressure from those around you or tempted to maintain your comfort, then you have taken the biggest step toward a life filled with personal satisfaction.

What are your values?

Can you answer without thinking? List three, five, even ten. Perhaps they are love, family, loyalty? Professional success and financial security? Nature or art? Challenge and skill development? Fame? Approval?

Values answer the question of why we live. They are the reason we get up in the morning and do everything we do during the day. If we go to work, our value may be career development, financial well-being, or providing a good life for our family. If we care for someone, that person is our value. If we exercise and eat right, it means we value our health and want to keep it good. And if we waste our time during the day, we probably don’t have any strong values that motivate us.

A successful life is not about living according to society’s values, but according to your own. For example, for a musician who places music and creative freedom above all else, it will be much more important to make songs that correspond to his personal aesthetic sense than to achieve commercial success at any cost. The first option will bring him true happiness. If he sacrifices himself for social approval, he will probably realize years later that he has not achieved what he really wanted.

Values are the most reliable compass for making decisions. When a decision protects our values, even after some time has passed, we will feel that we have done the right thing and will be able to defend it. If a person has clearly established values, we can predict with great accuracy how they will act. We can trust such a person because we know what they will never betray.

Our values bring us closer to those around us. Look at your closest people—your partner, friends, mentors—and you will notice that what really connects you to them are shared values. You consider the same things to be good and right. You envision a bright future for the world in the same way.

An animal rights activist will not, in most cases, consider a hunter to be a spiritually close person. A religious fanatic will find it difficult to build genuine trust with a hedonistic atheist. But if two people are united by a common vision of what should happen in the world, they automatically become comrades in destiny.

When our values are under pressure, it becomes clear who we really are and what we are made of. The overman will sacrifice his life, but not his fundamental values. It is precisely these great values that make people great. And it is exactly people with such values who are remembered throughout the centuries—those who gave their last breath in the struggle for freedom; those who spent hundreds of sleepless nights in search of knowledge for humanity; those who believed so deeply in their ability to improve themselves that they achieved things considered impossible for the human body.

Live according to your values, and you will be the heroes of your own lives.