The Career Graph: Finding Your Core Values
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Helen Tupper's career graph turns the vague instruction 'know your values' into a repeatable reflection exercise. You unravel your career so far into a line of highs and lows, then interrogate the standout points: who were you working with, what were you actually doing, what was present when you loved it and missing when you didn't. Those answers are clues, because your values are present when you are happy. You listen for repeated words, unusually sticky words and physical energy, cluster the words that mean the same thing to you, then rank the remaining candidates against each other until three or four rise to the top. Three to four, because that is memorable, meaningful and manageable. Because environment and other people skew the answers, the exercise is repeated over time rather than done once, and the resulting values are then fulfilled both inside and outside work.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Unravel your career into highs and lows
Start wherever you think your career began — a graduate scheme, a first job, university — and plot the journey to today as a series of highs and lows. It does not matter if you only have a year of experience; the point is to see the squiggle laid out rather than held vaguely in your head.
Pro tip You can run the same exercise on a single year (e.g. just 2022) as a lighter sense-check later on.
- 2
Probe the standout points in time
For each pronounced high and low, ask why. Who were you working with — not their names, but their characteristics: were they entrepreneurial, curious, aggressive? What were you actually working on? Describe a day in the life in detail. What was present when you loved it, and what was missing when you didn't?
Watch out Don't stop at the surface label ('good job', 'bad boss') — the value only shows up when you describe what was actually happening.
- 3
Collect the clues
Treat everything you say as data. Look for words you repeat over and over, 'sticky' words other people don't use, clusters of similar words, and your own physical response — people literally contract when they describe a low and expand when they describe a high. Ideally have someone else listen and play the words back to you.
Pro tip Get someone to keep you talking. The more you talk, the more clues there are to collect.
- 4
Cluster the words that mean the same thing to you
Two words can be different in a dictionary and identical in your head — 'community' and 'friendly', for example. When you hesitate between two options because they are getting at the same thing, park the exact wording and treat them as one cluster so the labelling doesn't slow you down.
- 5
Rank your satellite values down to three or four core values
You may have ten things that matter to you — these are satellite values. Score each word against every other word in turn ('what's more important to you, entrepreneurialism or community?') until a few consistently rise to the top. Stop at three to four core values.
Pro tip Three to four is the target because it is memorable, meaningful and manageable — you can actually use it to make decisions.
Watch out A list of ten is useless in practice: you can't remember it, and you will trade items off against each other anyway.
- 6
Sense-check by repeating it in a different place and time
Your environment, and the people around you when you do the exercise, can skew the output towards one narrow version of you. Redo the graph later, ideally somewhere else, and look for consistency. If the same words keep surfacing, you know you haven't been swayed by a place or a person.
Watch out Doing this once, alone, in the office you're unhappy in is the classic way to end up with someone else's values.
- 7
Fulfil the values inside AND outside work
Once you know your values, look for ways to get them met at work — including by reshaping or creating a role — but deliberately also outside it, through communities, contribution or trusteeship. Balanced sources of fulfilment mean a bad week at work doesn't flip your whole sense of self to red.
Pro tip If a value can't be met in your current role after real conversations, find it in a community or volunteer role while you decide your next move.
Watch out Making work the sole source of fulfilment risks enmeshment — your entire happiness then moves with your manager's mood or a business road bump.
In the wild
Looking back at her lows, Helen saw a pattern rather than a set of bad jobs: very process-driven organisations, siloed thinking, people who were aggressive in their approach. Set against her values of freedom, growth, energy and achievement, the diagnosis was obvious — the freedom wasn't there because everything was process-driven, and the energy wasn't there because of how people behaved. The roles hadn't failed her; they simply couldn't supply what makes her her. She also spotted the counter-signal in her highs: the Boots graduate scheme was a high because she was surrounded by keen people, doing new things, changing role every six months.
→ A clear, reusable explanation of which environments will and won't work for her, used to screen future moves.
Helen ran the exercise on Ali in real time with three questions: what matters about the people you work with, what does a perfect day of work look like, and what matters about the culture of the places you've worked. Ali answered with 'energizing', 'entrepreneurial', 'getting stuff done', teaching and learning, and described the hospital doctors' mess and WeWork with visible enthusiasm. Helen fed back what she'd heard: 'friendly' said three times, a theme of community or connection that was explicitly non-hierarchical, and the unusually sticky word 'expansive'. She then ranked a few of them head-to-head and found community and friendly were one cluster, not two values.
→ A shortlist of candidate core values built from Ali's own language rather than a generic list.
Common mistakes
Ticking words off a values list first
Scanning a list of value words and ticking three in a minute produces labels that don't stick. The list is a reinforcement tool — use it after you've reflected, to confirm the word you meant or catch one you missed. Values formed through a lifetime of experience need unpicking, not a tick box.
Doing it once, in one environment
Helen's business partner did the exercise alone on a high floor in Canary Wharf while working in banking and produced a one-sided, achievement-heavy set of values. Her manager challenged it, she redid it elsewhere, and got a far more nuanced answer. Repetition across contexts is what makes the output trustworthy.
Expecting work to meet every value
Trying to source all your fulfilment from one job creates enmeshment: a fallout with your manager or a business setback turns every value red at once. Deliberately spread fulfilment across work, communities and contribution.
From the transcript
“just sort of unravel the squiggle into a series of highs and lows”
“your values are present when you're really happy”
“it's memorable it's meaningful and it's manageable”
From the episode
5 Skills To Succeed in ANY Career - Helen Tupper (Squiggly Careers)
Helen Tupper (Squiggly Careers)