Inspirational values guide our lives and influences the choices we make on a daily basis. The best inspirational value is work ethic. No one successful ever became one of the all time greats by not having a strong work ethic.
When I was in college, the person who inspired me the most was Mark Cuban. His book was the first business book I ever read and it inspired me to do my best every single day. That’s why I put in so much work on my younger years, to work on my craft and to build my life one day at a time.
The best way to gain inspiration is to listen to the ones who already accomplished everything you want to accomplish. I grew up from a small town and there wasn’t a lot of inspirational figures to look up to. However, with the internet, it’s now more than possible to gain inspiration.
We no longer need to meet people in person to gain inspiration from others. I let the inspirational values guide my life and through the toughest moments. Only after do I give my goals everything I’ve ever got, will I ever be done. No matter how tough everything gets.
There’s no need to get inspiration on our own. We definitely don’t need to depend on sheer luck to meet an inspirational person. We control the information we allow into our lives because the Internet is such a wonderful place.
Information is available at our fingertips, which is very valuable.
Inspirational Values: 9 Great Guiding Principles
The 9 inspirational values below guide my life and have been a great force in driving my actions throughout my life. Even after 10 years of deploying the values, I still let the values guide me. It withstands the test of time.
1) Work Ethic
It’s one thing to fail because of a lack of talent. it’s another to fail because of a lack of effort. The end goal may be to work the least amount of hours and gain the most amount of money. However, until then, work ethic is a valuable characteristic that can’t be ignored.
While your friends are relaxing, spending money, and having a good time on the weekends, you’re building a lucrative side hustle that’ll outpace their 9-5 incomes. While others are just going home to watch TV after work, you’re working out in the company gym and exercising.
No one ever gets to the top without putting in the effort. Work ethic is a valuable character trait that should be taught from a young age. Due to globalization, we have a sea of immigrants who would do anything to be in your spot right now.
We need to show them that we can compete against them just as much as they can compete against us. Work ethic is one of the best inspirational values.
2) Inspirational Values: Intelligence
Intelligence isn’t an innate behavior. It’s learned. The key thing about intelligence that everyone misses is the understanding aspect of difficult concepts. Once I understand a concept, I retain the information and it may be of use to me sometime later in my life.
Intelligence is a learned trait and why it’s one of the inspirational values. No one is ever born knowing how to do everything. Everybody started clueless and eventually learned by noticing cause and effect behaviors. Pattern recognition. And critical thinking.
Our brains are great at recognizing patterns. The great thing about the world is that there are repeatable patterns. Once we understand the overall patterns that exist in the world, it’s not difficult to be intelligent because it’s not our first rodeo.
Being smart is great because it allows us to compete in this knowledge based economy we are in.
3) Kindness
This is one of the hardest traits I’ve had to re-learn. After coming into the career side of my life and learning just how cutthroat you have to be to succeed in business, I lost some of my kindness attributes. I recognize it but the hard part is, I’m having a hard time getting back into the optimistic and kindness side of the world.
The world is a cold and cruel place, in my opinion, and kindness is one of the inspirational values that I want to re-learn at some point in my life. The ones who’ve been hurt the most are usually the most kind. That’s something that I have a hard time getting behind.
It’s easy to turn sour after bad experiences with people. It’s hard to remain kind after experiencing bad things happen to you in this world. Our brains have a way of remembering traumatic experiences in vivid detail. Kindness when nothing is going your way is an inspiration.
The world and the people in it are kinder than we realize. We just remember the bad times more than the good ones.
4) Overcoming Hardships
No one ever has a 100% easy life for their entire lives. We all had to struggle and overcome hardships. It’s how we overcome these challenges that make up who we are. Not when everything works in our favor. But when nothing is going our way is when we show how we perform under pressure.
Overcoming hardships is one of the greatest inspirational values because everyone faces problems at some point in their lives. I personally am going through one of the toughest challenges of my life in 2023, figuring out how I’m going to get out of a $100k loss I dug myself into.
Although I’m making progress on figuring it out, it’s still the toughest challenge I’ve ever faced so far. I’m also bracing for a possibility of layoffs, which would hurt my progress even more. It’s not easy to go from broke to rich. No one ever said it was hard.
However, it’s a challenge one worth pursuing for ourselves and for our family.
5) Persistence
It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to stop everything, lay on the couch, and watch TV. We don’t have to exert any brainpower whatsoever to relax and let things take care of ourselves. It’s difficult to keep showing up even when you see minimal to no progress on your projects.
It’s my third year trying to make it as a finance influencer through this blog and my Twitter and I still am nowhere near close to giving up. Even as my results are not as great as I would’ve thought. Even as Elon Musk bought Twitter and is changing the algorithm almost daily, it seems.
I’m also making little to no money from either venture but I’m still putting in the time. It’s a passion and a dream of mine to educate people on personal finance and I will somehow figure out a way sometime to persist and push through.
It’s easy to give up but persistence is one of the inspirational values that more people should be aware of.
6) Success
This is one of the easiest inspirational values. Of course success would inspire others to pursue down your path. Because they think, “if he could do it, I could do it”. There’s many times when you will question if you have the capabilities to achieve greatness.
The road to greatness is much harder and difficult than anyone realizes. If it was easy, everyone would be millionaires. Thank goodness only the minority are rich. Success isn’t just defined by money or popularity but defined by mastering and achieving progress on your craft.
It feels great to know we’re progressing upwards and forwards on our goals. We have a dying desire to level up throughout our journey because remaining at the same level for the rest of our lives just doesn’t feel great. We’re better competitors than that.
Successful people gave me the inspiration to put in the work every day. To know that it’s possible to achieve your goals in the first place.
7) Inspirational Values: Doing Good
It’s easy to trick over a kind person. it’s easy to only pursue your interests for the rest of your life. What’s difficult is doing good for others who really need the help. We shouldn’t try to do good at the expense of our own happiness and money but we still should try to do good for others.
What MrBeast, a popular YouTuber, accomplished by doing good is nothing short of remarkable. I can only imagine just how much better the world has become because he was in it than the alternative. Doing good is one of the greatest inspirational values that’s lost today.
Everyone’s trying to put food at their own tables. Which is understandable. It takes courage to do good for others. Although I’m currently not in a place to give back to my community, I know one day, I will get there one day. There are some bad things happening in the world.
It would be great if we do good for others and help when others need help. No matter how bad our lives were, we still had others who helped out through our journey.
8) Honesty
It’s easy to lie to protect someone’s feelings. It’s difficult to tell the truth even if the other person’s feelings might be hurt. It might just be the best thing for them in the long run. I personally value honesty and do not care about the other person’s feelings.
It does cause others to get mad at me more often than usual but I’m completely OK with that. I would rather have others dislike me for who I am than love me for who I’m not. Honesty is one of the inspirational values because the truth is so rare these days.
Everyone wants to tell others what’ll make them feel good instead of telling others what they need to hear. Conflict is one of the biggest things that people try to avoid even when conflict is literally unavoidable. Truth, openness, and transparency are such important personal characteristics.
Honesty attracts more people to do business with you. Because they know while they may not like hearing your words, they respect your words.
9) Respect
People would rather be respected than liked. No matter how much people deny it, when you show someone respect, they’ll keep the relationship with you. When you tell others what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear, they’ll respect you.
Maybe they won’t like you, but they’ll respect you. Respect is one of the inspirational values because it holds long term value. It’s everlasting. Even though people won’t admit it, people have a dying need to be respected. Deep down inside, they want to be respected by others.
Even more so than being liked, loved, or appreciated. We care more about being disrespected than being disliked. When you show respect to someone else, they will be more likely to help you than even if you show that you like them.
It’s free to show respect to someone else yet the returns of doing so are infinite. We like people who take care of our interests more than our feelings.
Inspirational Values: My Story
It was the freshman year of my college. I was getting ready to compete against my classmates and try to move up in the world. Then I ran across a little show called Shark Tank, which let me know about inspirational figures such as Mark Cuban, Daymond John, and Kevin O’Leary.
I would spend hours reading their biographies and learning everything I could about how they made their life a success. I learned their inspirational values which I would then apply to my own life. It was inspiring the actions they took and the mindset they had to put their dreams into a reality.
The biggest lesson is that actions speak louder than words. It’s one thing to know what good values to follow are. it’s another to actually put the actions to good use. I put in the best effort I could in all of my challenges. Anything that would give me an edge over someone else, I put in the work.
As a result, I built up a net worth of $500k by the time that I was 28 years old. It’s one thing to learn and read about the qualities of success but another to put everything into practice. Although it’s taken me years and years of effort to get here, it was well worth it.
It’s just not good to live life without feeling anything. Without feeling inspired or feeling like you are achieving progress. Once you “get it” and figure everything out, you feel alive. I’m blessed to have been exposed to inspirational figures from a young age.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Inspirational Values Stick With You For Life
When you learn inspirational values for the first time and actually get inspired, it’s a game changer. That’s when your life has meaning. That’s when you know why you were born. The two most important days in your life is the day you are born.
And the day you find out why.
The road is a challenging one because nothing worth doing ever comes easy. The successful people in this world have amazing guiding principles that guide their life. Once you actually let inspirational values sink into your body and you let it reverberate throughout your entire body, the entire world changes.
The best part is that inspirational values stand the test of time. No matter what, it’s applicable throughout your entire life and you don’t forget them. Through the tough times and the most challenging times. Inspiration is something that many people lack.
Most people just go through the motions, work a 9-5 Monday – Friday and do the same things over and over again. They’re just waiting until something good happens to them instead of being proactive. That’s not the right way to go about life.
Life is a precious gift we must take advantage of at all costs. Using inspirational values to guide us throughout our life so that we can do amazing things is a great way to live. Life is wonderful and we have every bit of control to make it that way.
Inspirational Values: 9 Great Life Principles Shortlist
- Work ethic
- Inspirational values: intelligence
- Kindness
- Overcoming hardships
- Persistence
- Success
- Inspirational values: doing good
- Honesty
- Respect
