The North Star Core Value Test
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Once money stops being a motivator, the question of why you are still working becomes destabilising — both Ali and Patricia describe it keeping them up at night. The test they converge on is a thought experiment with a filter attached: imagine you won the Euromillions or had a hundred million in the bank, then ask what you would still spend your time on. The gap between how you spend your time now and how you would spend it then exposes which activities exist purely for revenue. The surviving activity, stated as a single core value rooted in service, becomes a North Star that every subsequent decision is checked against. Bright's answer was creating; Ali's was the freedom to learn and teach on his own terms.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Run the windfall thought experiment
Ask what you would do if you won the Euromillions and never had to worry about money. Ali notes the obvious answers do not survive: you would not sip cocktails on a beach in Thailand for more than about two weeks before it got boring.
Pro tip Use a specific number — Ali uses a hundred million — so the exercise stops being abstract.
- 2
Diff it against your actual week
Compare how you spend your time now with how you would spend it in that scenario. The difference identifies the things you are doing for money rather than joy. Ali concluded he would still make videos and record podcasts but would not sell courses — he would put them online free.
Watch out This does not mean stopping the revenue activity; Ali still runs courses because they sustain the business. It means knowing what they are.
- 3
Test candidate values against service, not status
Ali initially thought his core value was freedom, but freedom is a network good — it is only useful if the people around you have it too, otherwise you are watching Netflix on a Monday morning while your friends work. Reframing through service produced a value that held.
Pro tip If your candidate value only pays off in isolation, it is probably the wrong one.
- 4
State it as one sentence you could still do at 95
Bright's is creating — and she is explicit it need not be creating on YouTube; it could be creating life, a vegetable garden, or a brand. The longevity check filters out anything platform- or career-specific.
Pro tip Phrase it as an activity, not a job title, so it survives changes of medium.
- 5
Route every decision through it
Ali describes almost everything being optimised against the question of whether it moves him towards or away from the freedom to learn and teach on his own terms. If it moves him away, there must be a really strong reason for doing it.
Watch out The value is only useful as a filter; naming it without applying it changes nothing.
In the wild
Bright grew up poor, so money was a motivator for a long time — she knew what it was like to have nothing. Then she got money and found herself thinking 'is this it?'. She describes it as an existential crisis after which she no longer cared about money in that way. Over roughly two years she defined creating as her driver: as long as she is alive she will have ideas and try to make them happen, and if those ideas make someone feel good, laugh, or change their life a little, she is happy. It is the same impulse that made her start videos when she was bored.
→ A stated North Star — creating, with a service component — that she says she has become comfortable within herself about.
Working with a coach who advises executives who have already made enough money, Ali tested freedom as his core value and found it failed. Freedom is only useful if the people you spend time with also have it — otherwise it is Netflix at 9am on a Monday while everyone else works, which is not inherently fun. Looking at it through a service lens instead produced a version that survived: the freedom to learn and teach on his own terms. That became the filter for almost every subsequent decision.
→ Replaced a hollow value with one that functions as a working decision filter.
Common mistakes
Assuming the answer is leisure
Ali's point is that the beach-and-cocktails answer collapses after about two weeks. If the windfall scenario produces only rest, you have not run the exercise long enough to reach what you would actually do with the time.
Choosing a value that only works in isolation
Freedom failed Ali's test because it is a network good. A value that depends on everyone around you being unavailable is not a value you can build a life on.
Being afraid to look inside
Bright says most of us are scared to look inside and see what we actually like and do not care about, because shedding the expectations of the world is frightening. Avoiding the exercise means the borrowed goals stay in place by default.
From the transcript
“It's like, what is what is the thing that you would do if you won the Euromillions and you didn't need to worry about money?”
“and what he encourages them to do is find this one core value, and it's generally rooted in some form of service.”
“what's the difference between the way I'm spending my time right now versus the way I would spend my time if I had a hundred…”
From the episode
Patricia Bright: How She Built A Million Dollar Empire
Patricia Bright