This is my first blog post here, but instead of introducing myself, I'm going to jump right in, and see what happens.

I finished my Final Project for my MAIS degree a couple months ago. It was a very good learning experience in many ways, but one of the most significant ones was from exploring the sub-topic (within my project) of values versus goals as motivation for creative work.

Very soon now, with the coming of the New Year, we will be inundated with all sorts of well-meaning (and sometimes not so well-meaning) articles, TV bits, books and courses about setting goals and improving yourself with New Year Resolutions. I have personally made more than one resolution in the past, and have had about as much success with them as average - meaning not much. For the last several years, I haven't made resolutions, feeling that there was something...not wrong, really, so much as missing, in that approach.

Which brings me back to values. As part of my project, I happened to come across some material on the Schwartz Values Constellation, including a very good paper written by Schwartz himself, explaining some of the research behind it, and some of the implications. The paper can be downloaded free from http://segr-did2.fmag.unict.it/Allegati/convegno%207-8-10-05/Schwartzpaper.pdf

To sum the paper up, Schwartz and his colleagues did a great deal of cross-cultural research that showed that there were ten basic values that were fundamental motivators across all the cultures studied. These ten also had a highly consistent relationship with each other, which mapped into a circle, so that when a person held one value high, the ones next to it on either side were also held relatively high, and the ones opposite in the circle were always held low. Further research by others found that highly creative people consistently held the values of Self-direction and Benevolence high, and the values of Power and Security low.

But goals and goal-oriented behavior is about control, no? And control is about power and security. To carefully plan out steps to follow and goals to meet, as self-help gurus tell us to, is to act from the values of power and certainty, which are diametrically opposed to creativity.

Which makes setting goals for creative work (which is where I am, at the moment) kind of incompatable. At least that's how it seems to me...still thinking about this.

Anyone have any thoughts?