You say success matters to you, but when you examine how you actually spend your time and energy, the picture looks different. You wonder whether you're chasing someone else's definition or whether success is genuinely important to you at all.
Who This Is For (and Who It Is Not)
This is for you if you've found yourself saying yes to opportunities, titles, or goals that don't actually excite you. You say success matters, but you feel hollow achieving it. You're not sure what you want anymore because you've been running someone else's race. You suspect your definition of success was inherited, not chosen.
This is also for you if you've noticed a tension between the success you're building and the relationships you're losing, the time you're not having, the version of yourself that's disappearing. You're not burned out from working too hard on what you actually want. You're exhausted from working too hard on something that doesn't feel like yours.
This is not for you if you're content with how you've defined success and confident that your life reflects what actually matters to you. If you feel alignment between your ambitions and your lived experience, you don't need this. This is also not for someone looking for motivation or an external push to work harder. It's for someone who needs to know what they're working toward in the first place.
What You Will Discover
When you map your actual values using Schwartz's framework, you will see which values compete with success in your value structure. Schwartz (1992) identified ten universal value types and arranged them in a circumplex where adjacent values are compatible and opposite values create natural tension. Success sits in this structure alongside values like achievement, power, and hedonism. But it also sits opposite to values like benevolence and universalism. If you score high on both success and on care for others, you have discovered a real conflict, not a personal failure. The framework lets you see this clearly.
You will also stop accepting the vague definition of success you inherited. You will know whether success itself matters to you, or whether what matters is security, status, creativity, autonomy, helping others, or something else entirely. You will know which values genuinely drive you and which ones you've adopted to manage other people's expectations. That distinction is not small. It changes which opportunities you pursue, which doors you walk away from, and whether you can actually live your own life instead of administering someone else's.
Common Reasons People Wait
The first reason is fear that the assessment will tell you what you already suspect but haven't admitted. You worry that you will discover success is not actually your value, which means the last few years were misdirected, which means you have to change course, and change is expensive. This is real. The assessment is not neutral. But here is what matters: the cost of continuing without this information is higher than the cost of course correction. You are already unhappy. You are already wondering. The assessment does not create the problem. It clarifies it so you can actually do something about it.
The second reason is doubt that an assessment can capture something as personal and complicated as what you value. You worry it will put you in a box or oversimplify what matters to you. The My Values assessment is not a personality test. It surfaces the ten value types Schwartz identified across eighty-plus countries and shows you which ones matter most to you, ranked. It does not tell you who you are. It tells you what you are oriented toward. That information is more useful than you think.
The third reason is that you assume you already know your values, so why take the time. You know you care about family, or work, or integrity. But knowing something abstractly and knowing it in relation to other values are different things. When success competes with family time, you will choose family. But when success competes with a promotion, you might choose the promotion. The assessment shows you not just what you value, but the relative weight of your values, which is where the real information lives.
The My Values assessment surfaces your values, ranks them, and shows you where you are and are not living them.
Is success the same as achievement?
No. In Schwartz's framework, achievement and success are different values. Achievement is about accomplishment and being competent; it exists on a different part of the circumplex from success (which is about power, status, and social standing). You can be high in achievement and low in success, meaning you want to do things well but don't care about recognition.
What if I discover I don't value success at all?
Then you have clarity about why chasing it felt empty. You can stop. You can reallocate your energy toward what actually drives you. That is not failure. That is honest self-knowledge, which is worth far more than another promotion you don't want.
Can my values change over time?
Yes. Your value profile is stable enough to be useful, but life events, priorities, and seasons change what matters most to you. Someone might care deeply about security and tradition at one life stage and care more about autonomy and new experience at another. The assessment is a snapshot, not a fate.
What if my core values conflict with each other?
That is normal. Schwartz's circumplex shows that some values sit opposite each other, creating natural tension. If you value both success and benevolence, you will sometimes face choices where you cannot have both. Understanding the tension is the first step to making conscious decisions instead of defaulting to whichever pull is strongest at the moment.