TL;DR. A core values list is only useful after you cut it. Below are 100 values grouped into five everyday families so you can browse instead of staring at an alphabetical wall. Then the part most articles skip: narrowing to five by forced comparison, testing each survivor against a recent decision where it cost you something, and using the final five to decide which habits and goals are worth tracking at all. This is a structured reflection exercise, not a personality test. It will not predict what you do on a bad Tuesday.
Search for a core values list and you get the same artefact over and over. Two hundred abstract nouns in alphabetical order, a PDF download, and the instruction to circle the ones that resonate.
Everything resonates. That is the whole problem.
Nobody reads the word integrity and thinks, not for me. A list like that is not a discovery tool, it is a vocabulary, and vocabularies are only useful once you start making sentences with them. So here is the list, organised so you can move through it quickly, and then the part that actually costs you something.
The list, grouped so you can use it
Read each family in one pass. Do not deliberate and do not rank yet. Mark anything that makes you pause for half a second, then keep moving. Fifteen to twenty marks in total is about right.
How you work. Achievement, ambition, competence, discipline, efficiency, excellence, focus, impact, initiative, mastery, ownership, persistence, pragmatism, precision, productivity, professionalism, resourcefulness, results, rigour, thoroughness.
How you treat people. Candour, compassion, empathy, fairness, forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, honesty, hospitality, humility, kindness, listening, loyalty, patience, reliability, respect, service, tolerance, trust, warmth.
What you build. Beauty, craft, creativity, curiosity, design, entrepreneurship, experimentation, imagination, innovation, invention, knowledge, learning, legacy, mentorship, originality, problem solving, scholarship, storytelling, teaching, usefulness.
How you live. Adventure, balance, calm, challenge, community, faith, family, freedom, friendship, fun, health, humour, independence, joy, presence, simplicity, solitude, spontaneity, travel, wonder.
What you protect. Autonomy, boundaries, dignity, environment, equality, fidelity, honour, integrity, justice, order, privacy, responsibility, safety, security, stability, stewardship, sustainability, tradition, truth, wellbeing.
Those five families are a browsing aid, not a taxonomy. They exist so your eye has somewhere to go. Nothing breaks if you decide that craft belongs under how you work rather than what you build.
Why the wall of words does nothing on its own
Recognition is cheap. Reading a pleasant word and agreeing with it costs nothing, so it tells you nothing. That is why people finish these exercises with twelve values and a vague warm feeling.
Comparison is where the information is. "Do I value honesty?" has one available answer. "Would I rather be trusted or be free?" has a real one, and it splits people.
That is the design principle behind the values quiz on this site. It never asks you to rate anything. It puts twenty forced choices in front of you, each one a head to head between two of the ten value families in Shalom Schwartz's model, with every family appearing in four of the pairs. You cannot score everything highly, because choosing one side always costs you the other. At the end it ranks your top five, plots all ten on a wheel, and flags it when two of your top three are values that commonly pull against each other, achievement sitting next to benevolence being the classic case.
Worth being precise about what it is not, because tools like this get oversold. It does not sort the hundred words above. It works from ten broad research families, so its output is a direction rather than a wording you can copy straight onto a wall. Use it to find the shape, then borrow the exact words from the list.
Cutting twenty down to five
The narrowing is the exercise. Everything before it is warm-up.
Step one: drop to ten by subtraction. Go through your marked words and ask, of any two, which one you would give up first. Not which one you like less. Which one you would surrender if someone made you. Subtraction is easier to answer honestly than selection, because you are not being asked to declare an identity.
Step two: run the pairs. Take your remaining ten, compare them two at a time, and keep a tally of the winners. It is slow and slightly annoying, which is the point. This is the same mechanic the quiz automates, and doing it by hand on your own wording tends to be more revealing than doing it on someone else's.
Step three: keep the top five, write them down somewhere permanent. Not a note you will lose. Somewhere you will see them in three months.
Avoid the temptation to rate everything from one to ten instead. Rating lets you give six things a nine, which returns you to the warm feeling and no decision rule.
The test that makes a value real
Here is the step almost nobody does, and it is the one that turns the list from a personality quiz into something you can use.
For each of your five, name one decision in the last two years where holding that value cost you something concrete. Money, time, a promotion, a friendship, an easier evening.
If you cannot produce an example within a minute, it is not yet a value. It is an aspiration wearing a value's clothes.
| Value | What it cost me recently | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Independence | Turned down a full-time offer with better money to keep contract work and my evenings | Real |
| Craft | Rewrote a feature nobody complained about, twice, on my own time | Real |
| Health | Nothing I can point to. It gets sacrificed first when a deadline appears | Aspirational |
That third row is mine and I have written it honestly, because a values list that contains no uncomfortable rows is a list of things you would like to be praised for. Aspirations are allowed. They just need a different label, and a different plan, because closing that gap is a project rather than a description.
Where the five touch your week
This is the payoff, and it is the reason a values exercise belongs next to a habit tracker rather than in a journal you close.
For each surviving value, write one recurring commitment and one thing that commitment displaces. Both halves matter. A commitment with nothing displaced is a wish, because your week is already full.
| Value | Weekly commitment | What it displaces |
|---|---|---|
| Craft | One two-hour block for the unglamorous refactor | One evening of shipping features |
| Family | Phone in a drawer from pickup until bedtime | Evening notifications |
| Learning | Thirty pages of something outside my field | Half of my usual scrolling |
Then track those three, and only those three, for a month.
The reason to be this stingy is in the data I keep publishing about my own users. Across the 7,800 tracked habits in habits people quit fastest, about 45% were never checked off even once. People do not abandon habits because they are lazy. They abandon habits they picked because the habit sounded like something a good person would do, with nothing underneath it. A habit that traces back to a value you can defend in a real decision has a reason to survive a bad week. A habit that traces back to a Sunday evening mood does not.
If you want a structured way to see which existing habits are pulling in which direction, the habit scorecard exercise does exactly that, and I wrote up the method in the habit scorecard walkthrough.
What this exercise cannot do
Values work is a reflection exercise. It is not psychometrics and it does not predict behaviour.
Three honest limits.
Your answers move with your week. Take the same quiz on a calm Sunday and after a bad Wednesday and the order will shift. Take it twice a month apart, keep the overlap, ignore the rest.
Naming a value does not install it. Writing down discipline has never once made anyone disciplined. The list tells you which fights are worth having, not that you will win them.
Research frameworks were built for populations, not for you. Schwartz's model has been tested across a large number of countries and it is a genuinely useful map of how values sit relative to one another. That is not the same as a twenty-question web quiz telling you who you are. Anyone selling the second thing on the strength of the first is overreaching, and I would rather say so on my own tool page than have you find out later.
When to do it again
Once a year is plenty, plus any time something large changes. A birth, a diagnosis, a move, the end of something.
The natural home for it is a wider annual review, where values sit alongside the boring facts about where your time and money actually went. That combination is the whole life audit, and the two-hour version is written up in how to do a life audit. If you want the lighter version first, scoring your satisfaction across eight areas takes ten minutes and is covered in the wheel of life assessment.
A hundred words, cut to twenty, cut to five, each one attached to a decision that already cost you something, each one attached to something in your week.
That is the whole method. The list at the top is the easy part.
Last updated: November 2026.
Written by Eusebiu, the solo founder building Loggd in public. I build it in the evenings around contract work and a small daughter, which is itself the result of a values decision I have to keep re-making every few months. I share what the aggregate data keeps showing on Threads.
Make the five visible. Loggd turns each value into habits and goals you can actually see, with a forgiving contribution grid instead of a streak counter that punishes one bad week. Start free.
