How to discover your career values in 10 minutes

A product manager named Jonas sat down last spring to figure out his values. He had an offer to decide on in 72 hours. He'd downloaded three worksheets and a 47-question survey. Two hours later he had a color-coded spreadsheet, a headache, and exactly zero more clarity than when he started.

The problem with most values exercises is that they ask you to imagine. Imagine your ideal day. Imagine your funeral. Imagine a life where money was solved. Imagination is a terrible data source because you'll describe the person you'd like to be, not the one you are.

Memory is better. Here's a 10-minute method that uses memory instead.

The three moments method

Set a timer for 10 minutes. You'll need a pen and something to write on. No phone.

Write down three moments from your work life. Just three. Use these exact prompts:

1. A moment when you felt alive at work. Not "good." Not "productive." Alive. The kind of moment where you thought, I could do this forever.
2. A moment when you felt dead at work. Not stressed. Dead. Hollow. When you were going through motions and wondering what you were doing with your life.
3. A moment when you were proud of yourself at work. Not when others praised you. When you privately thought, I did that right.

You want specifics. Not "when I was at Stripe." A specific afternoon. A specific meeting. A specific line of code or slide or sentence.

Give yourself two minutes per moment. Write fast. Include the sensory details — what room, what time of day, who else was there.

Now extract

Spend the last four minutes doing this for each moment:

• For the alive moment: what were you actually doing? Not your job title. The activity. (Were you solving a problem alone? Explaining something to someone? Making a decision under pressure? Shipping something?)
• For the dead moment: what was being taken from you? (Autonomy? Meaning? Contact with real users? The ability to do deep work?)
• For the proud moment: what did you do that nobody would know to credit you for? (The real thing, not the credited thing.)

The alive answer points at what energizes you. The dead answer points at what drains you. The proud answer points at what you privately think matters.

Three values, roughly. Usually more concrete than anything you'd have come up with from a worksheet.

A real example

Here's what I got from a senior engineer named Priya when we did this exercise together.

Alive moment: 2am, debugging a production issue alone, finally finding the root cause in a library three levels deep. She described it as "the best hour of my year."

Dead moment: a quarterly planning meeting where she watched a decision get made for political reasons she couldn't push back on.

Proud moment: quietly rewriting a junior engineer's PR in her head, realizing there was a cleaner approach, and then coaching him to the answer instead of just telling him.

Her extracted values:

• Deep problem-solving, alone, with a real answer at the end
• Technical authority that's actually respected in decisions
• Quiet mentorship where she isn't the one getting credit

Compare that to the values list she'd written before: autonomy, growth, collaboration. Same values, technically. But the first list is a filter. The second is a horoscope.

Why this works

Memory is stubborn. You can lie to a worksheet but you can't lie to a specific afternoon. The moment either happened or it didn't. The feeling was either there or it wasn't.

This method also surfaces values you'd be embarrassed to list. Wanting to be technically respected is a real value, but nobody writes "ego" on their values exercise. Wanting to mentor without credit is a real value, but it doesn't fit in any of the 30 menu words. Wanting to be alone with a hard problem at 2am is a real value, and it's more useful than "autonomy" because it tells you what kind of autonomy.

The two-week test

Once you have your three values, run one more check. For each value, find one moment in the last two weeks where you either got it or missed it. If you can't find a single moment either way, the value might not be as central as you thought.

If you got the value and felt good, that's confirmation. If you missed it and felt bad, that's stronger confirmation. If neither — downgrade it. Values without recent emotional evidence are usually aspirational.

The takeaway

You don't need two hours. You need 10 minutes and three specific memories. Your values are already in your head. They just show up as stories, not keywords.

Run this tonight. See what falls out. If your honest three don't match the ones you've been telling yourself, that's the most useful 10 minutes you've spent on your career this year.