Case Study 1: Jordan — The Spreadsheet That Couldn't Decide

Background

The conversation with Dev about the agency job did something to Jordan.

It was not that Dev's situation was identical to his own — it wasn't. But the form of the question Dev was wrestling with — I know what the practical answer is, but something underneath it won't cooperate — was a form Jordan recognized. He had been wrestling with a version of it for months.

He had been approaching his stalled proposal as a motivation problem, and then as an identity problem, and now, reading the chapter on values, he wondered if it was something more foundational. Not "why can't I start?" or "who am I if I do this?" but: What do I actually care about, and is this proposal an expression of it or just the next thing on the list?

He decided to find out.

The Values Exercise

Jordan spent a Saturday morning with a notebook and the Schwartz framework from the chapter. He listed what mattered to him, clustered the list, and arrived at what he was willing to call his core values:

Competence and excellence — doing things well, building genuine mastery; the satisfaction of work that is high-quality and correct
Intellectual freedom and curiosity — following ideas wherever they lead; not being locked into one frame or one domain
Impact — contributing something that actually changes things for people; not just producing output
Authenticity — living and working in ways that feel genuinely his rather than performed or inherited
Connection and care — the relationship with Dev and the people he is close to; not being so consumed by work that the connections become maintenance interactions

He mapped these onto the Schwartz axes. Impact and Connection/Care sat clearly in the Self-Transcendence region. Competence and Excellence sat in Achievement. Intellectual Freedom was clearly Self-Direction/Openness to Change.

The interesting observation: these values were largely compatible. He was not working against himself. But when he applied the behavioral audit — when he asked what his work calendar actually revealed about his values in practice — the picture was less aligned.

Competence and excellence: Highly expressed in his work. Almost over-expressed — he spent time on quality control that exceeded what the work required.

Intellectual freedom: Moderately expressed. He read widely, but most of his active intellectual energy went into work frameworks. He had not pursued anything genuinely outside his professional lane in years.

Impact: Low expression. The work he did was good, but the impact was diffuse and attributed to the company's outcomes, not his own contribution. He could not name, with confidence, something that had gotten meaningfully better because Jordan specifically had made it so.

Authenticity: Low-moderate. He performed the professional role well. Whether the role itself was genuinely his — whether he would have chosen it from scratch — was exactly the question he had been sitting with.

Connection and care: Lower than he wanted to admit. He spent time with Dev, but often the quality was not there — he was present in body but mentally reviewing something from work. The relationship was maintained; it was not fully inhabited.

The Spreadsheet Problem

Jordan had, in fact, built a spreadsheet for the proposal decision. Rows: market opportunity, resource requirements, risk, upside, timeline, stakeholder support. Columns: scenarios.

He had built an excellent spreadsheet. He had looked at it many times. It had not produced a decision.

Reading the chapter's discussion of espoused versus enacted values, he understood why.

The spreadsheet was asking a practical question: Is this venture feasible and likely to succeed? That question had a reasonably good answer (probably yes, with appropriate caveats). What the spreadsheet could not answer was a values question: Is this venture worth doing — and worth the risk of what it might cost?

The values question was not about feasibility. It was about what he wanted his work life to express. And the answer to that question was not in any column.

The proposal was, in values terms, the highest-expression option for three of his five core values: Impact, Authenticity, and Intellectual Freedom. It would allow him to make a contribution he could name, to work in a way that felt genuinely chosen, to think outside the frameworks he had been using for seven years.

It would also, if it went badly, cost him something. Professionally and personally.

That cost had been what he had been calculating in the spreadsheet, without quite naming it as a values trade-off. The trade-off was real: pursuing Authenticity and Impact meant taking a risk that threatened Competence (the risk of failing publicly) and might add stress to Connection/Care (less margin in the relationship).

Not a simple answer. But at least the right question.

The Belief Underneath

There was a belief underneath the spreadsheet that Jordan had not fully named.

Working through the chapter's discussion of core beliefs, he found it: Success in novel domains requires certainty before attempting. He had been waiting to feel certain that the proposal would succeed before investing in it seriously. And certainty never came, because certainty is never available in advance.

The belief was not entirely irrational. He had seen proposals fail. He knew the cost of failed ventures in political capital and time. The belief was a reasonable inference from experience.

But it was also a limiting belief in the technical sense: it was functioning as a behavioral rule that prevented a values-aligned action. Using the defusion technique from the chapter: I am having the thought that success in novel domains requires certainty before attempting. I can attempt the proposal anyway.

He wrote that down.

Dev's Decision

Dev submitted the application to the design agency — the one with more money and less alignment — and then immediately withdrew it.

"I needed to see what it felt like to have sent it," Dev told Jordan that evening. "It felt like nothing. Less than nothing. So I withdrew it."

Jordan smiled. "The values test."

"Yes. Turns out the values test is actually useful."

They sat with that for a moment.

"I think," Jordan said, carefully, "I've been using the spreadsheet as a substitute for the values test. Because the values test requires me to admit what I actually care about, which then makes it harder to not pursue it."

Dev looked at him steadily. "Is that true?"

"Yeah," Jordan said. "I think it's true."

The Analysis

The alignment diagnosis

Jordan's core values are largely compatible with each other and with who he wants to be. The problem is not values conflict. It is values-to-behavior alignment — specifically, in the domains of Impact, Authenticity, and Connection/Care, the alignment is lower than his stated values would predict.

The proposal addresses the Impact and Authenticity gaps directly. The question is whether he will also attend to the Connection/Care gap — or whether pursuing the proposal will further crowd out the relationship with Dev, which would be a different kind of values misalignment.

The belief that must be named

"Success requires certainty before attempting" is the belief that has been running beneath the surface. It is not true — success never comes with prior certainty — but it has been functioning as a rule. Naming it does not automatically change it. But naming it makes it available for examination in a way that the unarticulated belief is not.

The meaning dimension

Frankl's framework adds something the Schwartz and ACT frameworks do not fully capture: the question of what the work means to Jordan, not just whether it expresses his values. The proposal, if successful, would mean something. It would be evidence of agency, of having made a bet on himself and won. That is attitudinal value in Frankl's terms — a stance toward the challenge.

If it fails, that too can be given meaning: the attempt itself is worth more than the comfortable abstention. The chapter's research on Baumeister's four needs notes that efficacy — the sense of having meaningful control over outcomes — requires actually attempting to exercise control.

You can't feel efficacious about a proposal you never sent.

Discussion Questions

1. Jordan's spreadsheet was answering the wrong question — feasibility rather than values alignment. How common is this substitution? What makes it easier to analyze a decision than to examine what you actually care about?

2. The chapter notes that values alignment requires ongoing attention — it is not achieved once. In Jordan's case, what specific recurring practice would best maintain alignment between his stated values and his daily behavior?

3. The belief "success requires certainty before attempting" is identified as limiting. But it is based on real experience of consequences. How do you distinguish between a reasonable, experience-based caution and a limiting belief that is restricting valued action?

4. The Connection/Care value is consistently underexpressed in Jordan's life. Given his personality profile (high conscientiousness, high neuroticism from Chapter 8), what structural changes would be most effective for improving the quality of his time with Dev?

Application Exercise

Conduct your own version of Jordan's values-to-behavior audit.

List your five most important values from your Chapter 11 exercises or a fresh reflection.
For each value, rate current life expression (1–5).
Identify the value with the largest gap between importance (5) and expression.
Identify one decision you are currently facing or deferring that would, if made, move you toward expression of that value.
Identify the belief that may be preventing that decision. Write it out, then apply the defusion technique.

Write a 200-word reflection.