In the summer of 2007, Alan Stein Jr. was working at Nike’s three-day Kobe Bryant Skills Academy in Southern California. This was a camp for top high school and college basketball players, and one of the camp’s counselors was Stephen Curry, then still a college student at Davidson.
Stein, a basketball performance coach, noticed how intentional Curry was about everything he did at the camp. He’d arrive early to workouts, wanting the extra time to shoot hoops. Crazily, he wouldn’t leave the gym until he swished five consecutive free throws. The ball touching the rim even once meant starting all over.
Stein later told this story in a YouTube video: he had seen someone whose everyday habits matched his vision. Curry knew what he valued and built his days around that.
In coaching and advising conversations I’m in, we sometimes start one step earlier: does what you’re spending your time on match what matters to you? It’s a simple question. You list 2-3 things that are most important, then compare that list to how life is unfolding.
You might realize you want to visit your parents more often, take better care of your health, or make room for new creative projects. But the way your work is structured leaves little time or energy for those things to actually happen. You may find you’re spending time on things at work that aren’t even the most valuable things to focus on at work. Man, I’ve lived that.
The values vs. time gap was also something Charlene and I looked at before I decided to make a work change at the end of last year. We increasingly valued helping people, travel, outdoor activities, and visiting our now older sons wherever they were.
But my time didn’t fully map to those things. My days were filled with wall-to-wall Slack problem-solving from early in the morning until the evening. “Deep work” would happen over weekends. Work-related travel had me away from my family at times.
Stress and my own preoccupation with whatever work problem needed solving were consuming more of my headspace than I wanted. I was working on something meaningful that helped people and I enjoyed my teams, but the math didn’t fully add up anymore.
Hearing Charlene softly explain that our sons were concerned about me — and only telling her that — hit me pretty hard. They knew I was busy and didn’t want to bother me, but they were worried. That became part of our conversation about making a change.
We had been fitting life, travel, and family around company work, into gaps that were small. We decided to work backward from the life we wanted to create and evolve a work setup around that. I moved from corporate work that I’d done for 25 years into a solo coaching and advisory practice where I controlled my time.
The point is not that everyone should leave their job. Not everyone has that flexibility or desire given life stage and context. You could deeply value completing an important project at work, or a team you’re building, or the impact you can create with your skills. Plus, there are lots of smaller changes that can help if you notice a values versus time gap. It’s the noticing that’s important.
Here’s a concrete way to play with this that I learned from Katia Verresen. Surf through your phone’s camera roll, with your favorite music on, and look for the most meaningful past moments in time. Go back over the last year. Notice patterns and pick a few moments to consider even more deeply.
Ask yourself what made those moments important or memorable to you. Could be work or personal contexts.
Then imagine scenarios where you create more moments like that in an ordinary month, quarter, or year. Of course, not every meaningful moment gets photographed. But a quick camera roll surf helps jog the memory. Then you can scan your calendar with those patterns in mind. Do you make room for those things?
Reaching a goal of any kind doesn’t necessarily make you happier. In Sheldon and Elliot’s 1999 research, people put more sustained effort into goals that matched their own values. Plus, achieving those goals brought greater gains in well-being.
The authors also describe how we can, yes, sometimes go after goals shaped by other people’s expectations or our sense of what we “should” do.
I still surf my camera roll every so often to check what pops for me looking backwards versus how I’m spending my time looking forward. If you try it, here are three basic questions I noodle on, too:
What are my meaningful moments telling me about what matters?
Where — and how often — does that show up in how I spend my time?
What’s one change I could make this week to create more room?
Let me know how it goes. You can reply to this email if you like.