You say excellence is important to you. But you notice you're not chasing it the way you used to, or the way people around you are. That gap between what you claim to value and how you actually spend your time is what makes you wonder: is excellence really mine, or did I inherit it?
Who This Is For (and Who It Is Not)
This is for you if you've felt a quiet friction between pursuing excellence and pursuing other things—peace, connection, security, enough-ness. You're not struggling with motivation or discipline. You're asking a deeper question about whether this drive actually belongs to you or whether it's something you picked up from a parent, a coach, a culture you were raised in. You're willing to be honest if the answer is no.
This is also for you if you recognize that excellence matters to you, but you're unsure how much it should matter. You want to know its actual rank in your value hierarchy, not its rank in your job description or in what your industry tells you to care about. You suspect it might sit in the middle—real, but not central—and you need to see that clearly.
This is not for you if you're already certain that excellence is core to who you are and you're looking for ways to pursue it more efficiently. You don't need permission or clarity; you need execution. This is also not for you if you're trying to talk yourself into caring about excellence because someone else thinks you should. That work happens somewhere different.
What You Will Discover
Schwartz's research on basic human values, tested across 80+ countries over decades, shows that values exist in a circular structure. Some values sit adjacent to each other and naturally reinforce one another—excellence, for instance, shares space with achievement and security. Other values sit opposite on the circle and create genuine tension—excellence and security can pull in different directions, as can excellence and tradition. Once you understand this structure, you stop thinking of your values as a list and start seeing them as a system with built-in conflicts.
When you map your actual values using Schwartz's framework, you discover something more useful than motivation: you discover why certain choices feel effortless and others feel like you're swimming upstream. You'll see which values genuinely support excellence in your life and which ones are competing for your attention. You'll know whether your drive for excellence is serving something you care about or just consuming space that other priorities need.
Common Reasons People Wait
The first is fear of the answer. If you test and find that excellence isn't actually central to your values, you'll have to reckon with years of decisions made on its behalf. You might have chosen a career, chosen burnout, chosen a particular kind of person to be, all under the assumption that excellence mattered most. Knowing it doesn't will require you to rebuild something. That's real work, and it makes sense to hesitate. But continuing to chase something you don't actually value is heavier work than changing direction.
The second is that excellence still matters somewhat, and you're not sure that "somewhat" is an acceptable answer. You've been taught that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. But Schwartz's research shows that every person ranks values in a different order—and most people have values that are more central than excellence. Knowing where excellence actually sits for you means you can stop the exhausting project of making it matter more than it does. That's not permission to be careless; it's permission to be proportional.
The third is uncertainty about what a career values assessment actually tells you. You might think it measures personality or aptitude or what job you should have. It doesn't. It surfaces what you actually care about underneath the roles you play, then shows you where your life is and is not aligned with those priorities. You'll see concrete gaps—the ones that explain your restlessness—and you'll also see surprising alignments you didn't notice.
The My Values career values assessment surfaces your actual hierarchy and shows you where excellence lands, relative to what else matters to you.
Is excellence a common core value?
Schwartz's research shows that achievement-oriented values matter significantly to many people, especially in professional contexts. But they're often less central than people think, and they frequently create tension with values like family connection, security, or personal wellbeing. Excellence is genuinely important to many people—just not as a default or a universal priority.
Can excellence be a value even if I'm not chasing it right now?
Yes, but there's a difference between something being a value and something being an aspiration or an obligation. A value is something you actually care about and arrange your life around. If excellence matters to you but you're not pursuing it, that's worth understanding—sometimes it means you're prioritizing something else that's more important right now; sometimes it means you never actually valued it as much as you thought.
What if my values don't match my job?
That misalignment is one of the most useful things to discover. You can either shift what your job demands of you, shift what you expect from your job, or shift the job itself. But you can't make a good decision about any of those without knowing clearly what you actually value. That's where the assessment helps.
Will this assessment tell me if I should care more about excellence?
No. It will tell you what you actually care about. What you do with that information is your call. Some people discover they care about excellence less than they thought and feel relief. Others discover they care about it more than they realized and choose to stop compromising on it. The assessment doesn't prescribe—it clarifies.