Today I worked, I went to school, and I took time to do the things I enjoy.  I would say that this fulfills all five of my top five values.  Personal accomplishment, development and wisdom are checked off by school and work, enjoyment is checked off by my leisure time, and I get to be creative in my work and in school.  I use my imagination to solve problems and do well on my assignments.  My list doesn’t look correct to me below the line, but since most of those values are important, it is hard to say which ones don’t matter.

I believe that I inherited my goal of personal accomplishment and personal development from my family.  Both of my parents are hard workers, and they value finishing what you start.  I have personal goals for myself for both the long term and the short term, and even though I don’t always meet those goals, I never give up or stop trying.  Most of the time, I fail to meet a goal because of time or money constraints.  Being a student is hard work, and it doesn’t leave a lot of time to do other important things.

In the reading, the topic of personal bias comes up.  In the reading it says that “Ultimately, of course, nobody can ever be objective.  The author of this book may not be a specialist, he may not be committed in a professional sense to any of the six mental modes, but he is a human being: he has personal evaluations and beliefs of his own, and these will inevitably color what he writes” (17).  I found this to stand out because of how simple it is, yet it is hard to see.  Someone who comes to America from another country after living there for 20 years will always have their own cultural beliefs and “personal evaluations.”  It is impossible to escape, unless we work really hard at seeing what our culture has taught us, and avoid it.  But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I think that most people understand that we all have a bias, and that people’s opinions and values will change because of that.  When we ask for advice, like the reading suggested, we just have to remember that and take it into account.

Then there was the question that said “if we can establish a framework for sorting through values, and keep it as objective as possible, will it help us in our lives?”  I don’t think it would.  I think that completely removing values from questions and having a 100% objective stance would not help anyone.  For example, in the reading, the question he suggested to ask the different people was what to do for a career.  Each person I might ask will have a different bias, which means they will all take into account different aspects of that question.  The philosophy professor might focus on how happy my career will make me versus how much money I will make, but a church leader would focus on how much good it will do for the community.  So the professor might suggest being a businessman, and the church leader would suggest becoming a doctor or a teacher.  In my opinion, with every question we have to take into account what our values and focuses are, or else the question has no meaning, or at least less meaning.