Living a life according to your values is no easy task. First off, you have to decide what you values actually are and then how to harmonize your life accordingly. Being a millennial can be a frustrating experience in which the world seems to be constantly telling you "do what you love," but it can be surprisingly hard to have the sort of authentic experiences necessary to figure out what it is you love to do.

I’m a naturally curious and engaged individual, the high school I attended was stimulating academically and athletically. If you’d asked my why I was doing what I did, I would have told you that I enjoyed it and needed to get into college. Since I worked from 6:30am until about 10pm everyday, I didn’t have much time to actually reflect on what I was doing.

When I started college, that changed. I dropped serious athletic pursuits and academics were actually quite a bit less rigorous and certainly less time consuming. I thought more about why I was learning what I was learning. I had to think about what my values were and how I lived out those values in my daily life. I was not at all sure of the relevance of the content I was learning. I’d observe classmates who wanted to be doctors or lawyers in a history class cramming material they would forget a week later, and I couldn’t understand the point. As a result, I spent less time working and more time getting to know my fellow classmates. I still know about half of my graduating class by name, but can’t remember most of the content I had learned.

After graduating I worked at a bank and learned the myriad of ways an organization could be dysfunctional. Again, I saw a lot of people doing work they didn’t understand or value. What’s worse, I was one of those people, and, unlike in college, I didn’t develop a network of relationships I valued through my career.

Doing work you don’t value produces an inordinate amount of cognitive dissonance that can be quite stressful. Learning to identify address the cause of the dissonance has been very helpful. I continue to place tremendous value of the relationships I have in my life and feel incredibly fortunate to have great relationships with my family and my wife. My lived experience has taught me to continue to value the importance of authentic relationships not just in my personal life, but also in the work that I do.