Your strongest experiences are already telling you what you value
You can spend months trying to intellectually derive your values from first principles — debating whether you value freedom or security, creativity or stability, connection or independence. Or you can look at the data your own life has already generated.
Every person carries a record of peak experiences: moments of unusual aliveness, deep engagement, or profound satisfaction. These moments are not random. They cluster around specific conditions, specific roles, specific kinds of engagement. And those clusters point directly at your core values — often more accurately than any amount of abstract reasoning.
The previous lesson established that values are discovered through reflection, not invented through aspiration. This lesson gives you the primary instrument for that discovery: systematic analysis of the experiences that have mattered most to you.
Maslow's discovery: peak experiences as value signals
In 1964, Abraham Maslow published Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, arguing that the most intense moments of human experience — what he called peak experiences — are not random emotional spikes but structured encounters with specific values. He described peak experiences as moments where the world is perceived as "beautiful, good, desirable, worthwhile," accompanied by feelings of wonder, awe, and a sense that the experience is "self-validating, self-justifying" — carrying its own intrinsic value.
What made Maslow's work revolutionary was not just cataloging these experiences but identifying what they reveal. Through studying self-actualizing individuals, he identified what he called B-values (Being-values) — values that emerge naturally during peak experiences. These include truth, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, justice, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, completion, and self-sufficiency. These are not values people are taught to hold. They are values people discover they hold when their deficiency needs are met and their experience becomes fully engaged.
The critical insight for value identification is this: Maslow argued that B-values are not produced by peak experiences — they are revealed by them. The experience strips away the noise of daily survival, social performance, and habitual distraction, and what remains is what you actually care about. A peak experience is a window into your operating values, unfiltered by the stories you tell yourself about who you should be.
Flow states: when engagement reveals what matters
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow extends Maslow's framework from rare, transcendent moments to the texture of everyday activity. Flow is the state of complete absorption in an activity — where challenge and skill are balanced, self-consciousness drops away, time perception shifts, and the activity becomes "autotelic," meaning it is its own reward.
Csikszentmihalyi developed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) in the late 1970s to study these states as they actually occur. Participants carried pagers and, when signaled at random intervals throughout the day, recorded what they were doing, how challenged they felt, how skilled they felt, and their emotional state. Across thousands of data points from diverse populations, a pattern emerged: people reliably enter flow in specific activities and contexts — and those contexts are not the ones they would necessarily predict.
The flow data reveals values in action. When you consistently enter flow while mentoring others but not while doing solo technical work, that tells you something about what you value — even if your stated identity is "technical expert." When you lose track of time while designing systems but watch the clock during status meetings, your engagement pattern is disclosing a value hierarchy that your conscious self-assessment might miss entirely.
Csikszentmihalyi's research on the autotelic personality adds another layer. People with strong autotelic traits — curiosity, persistence, low egotism, and a high propensity for intrinsic motivation — experience flow more frequently and report greater life satisfaction. But the direction of causation matters here: these people do not experience flow because they have good traits. They experience flow because they have learned, often without explicit awareness, to orient their lives toward activities that align with their intrinsic values. The autotelic personality is not a personality type. It is a values-aligned life.
The three needs that peak experiences illuminate
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci across four decades of research, identifies three basic psychological needs that, when satisfied, produce the conditions Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi described: autonomy (acting from genuine choice rather than external pressure), competence (experiencing effectiveness and mastery), and relatedness (feeling meaningfully connected to others).
Ryan and Deci's key finding is that these needs are not preferences that vary from person to person — they are universal requirements for psychological well-being. But the way they are satisfied varies enormously. One person's autonomy is expressed through entrepreneurship; another's through artistic practice; another's through the freedom to structure their own workday. The need is universal. The expression is individual. And peak experiences reveal your particular expression.
This is why peak experience analysis works as a values identification tool: your most meaningful moments are almost always moments where one or more of these basic needs was deeply satisfied — in your particular way. The engineer who felt most alive during a hackathon might be revealing a value for creative autonomy (autonomy + competence without external constraint). The teacher who describes their best day as the one a struggling student finally understood might be revealing a value for developmental impact (competence + relatedness through growth). The specific combination and expression is uniquely yours.
Why peak experiences outperform abstract values exercises
Most values identification approaches ask you to select from a list. Pick your top five from a set of fifty value words. Rank them. This approach has a fundamental problem: it operates at the level of language, not experience. You might select "creativity" because it sounds aspirational, or skip "security" because it sounds boring — while your actual behavior reveals that you organize your entire life to minimize financial uncertainty and rarely create anything that wasn't assigned to you.
Peak experience analysis bypasses this linguistic layer entirely. Instead of asking "what do you value?", it asks "when were you most alive?" — and then extracts the values from the answer. The data is behavioral and experiential, not conceptual. You cannot easily deceive yourself about which moments left the deepest impression.
Michael Steger and Bryan Dik's research on meaningful work reinforces this approach. Their Work and Meaning Inventory found that people who experience their work as meaningful describe it in terms that point to specific values: experiencing positive meaning in work tasks, sensing that work nurtures meaning in their broader life, and perceiving their work as benefiting some greater good. The common thread is that meaningful experience and values alignment are the same phenomenon observed from different angles. When your experience is meaningful, your values are being honored. When your values are being honored, the experience registers as meaningful.
The savoring method: extracting values from positive experience
Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff's research on savoring — the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences — provides the operational method for turning peak experiences into values data.
Bryant and Veroff (2007) identified three temporal dimensions of savoring: reminiscing (reflecting on past positive experiences), savoring the moment (attending to positive experiences as they happen), and anticipating (imagining future positive experiences). For values identification, reminiscing is the most immediately useful — but moment-savoring builds the ongoing data collection habit that makes values identification a living practice rather than a one-time exercise.
Their reminiscence protocol asks you to find a moment where you felt "really alive, when all struggle from daily life just paused." This is not nostalgia. It is forensic: what specifically was happening? What role were you playing? What conditions were present? What would have been different if you had been doing the same activity but under different conditions?
The specificity matters. "I felt alive when I was traveling" tells you almost nothing. "I felt alive when I was navigating a city alone, without a plan, making decisions in real-time with no one to consult" tells you something quite specific about autonomy, spontaneity, and self-reliance. The value is never in the activity itself. It is in the specific conditions of engagement that made the activity come alive.
The peak experience audit: a structured protocol
Here is how to convert your peak experiences into a working values map:
Step 1: Collect raw data. List 8-10 moments from across your life where you felt most alive, most engaged, or most deeply satisfied. Include professional and personal moments, childhood memories and recent ones, planned events and spontaneous ones. Don't filter for importance — intensity of felt experience is the only criterion.
Step 2: Decompose each experience. For each moment, answer: What was I doing? What role was I playing? Who was I with (or was I alone)? What was at stake? What skill was I using? What need was being met? What would I have lost if I hadn't had this experience?
Step 3: Identify patterns. Look across all 8-10 experiences. What themes recur? Maybe five of them involve teaching or explaining. Maybe seven involved situations with clear challenge and immediate feedback. Maybe most of them happened when you were operating autonomously. The recurring conditions are your value signatures.
Step 4: Name the values. Translate the patterns into value statements. Not single words ("creativity") but specific expressions ("creating something from nothing under time pressure with a small team"). The more specific the formulation, the more useful it becomes for decision-making.
Step 5: Test against revealed behavior. Cross-reference your extracted values with how you actually spend your time (the work of L-0621 and L-0622 in this phase). If your peak experiences reveal a value for deep creative work but your calendar shows 80% meetings, you have found a misalignment — and the peak experience data, not the calendar, is telling you what you actually value.
The distinction between peak experiences and peak achievements
This is the most common error in peak experience analysis, and it will corrupt your results if you don't catch it.
Peak achievements are outcomes that look impressive: graduating, getting promoted, winning an award, hitting a revenue target. Peak experiences are moments that feel deeply engaging, alive, or meaningful — regardless of whether anyone else noticed.
Sometimes they overlap. But often they don't. You might remember your promotion primarily as relief that the political maneuvering was over. You might remember a Tuesday afternoon spent debugging a fascinating problem as one of the best days of your career. If you only analyze achievements, you'll extract the values your culture rewards. If you analyze experiences — the felt quality of engagement — you'll extract the values that are actually yours.
Maslow was explicit about this distinction. Peak experiences are not about accomplishment. They are about a quality of consciousness — a way of perceiving and engaging with reality that reveals what you find inherently valuable, independent of external validation. The moment you filter for "impressive" experiences, you have replaced self-discovery with social performance.
What changes when AI enters the picture
A peak experience log becomes dramatically more useful when AI can analyze it. After four weeks of entries, an LLM with access to your log can do what human pattern-recognition struggles with: cross-reference dozens of entries, identify subtle recurring conditions, flag contradictions between your peak experience patterns and your stated values, and surface themes you didn't see because they operate below your conscious pattern-detection threshold.
More importantly, AI can ask the decomposition questions in Step 2 far more systematically than you will on your own. Left to your own devices, you'll describe a peak experience at the surface level: "I loved that project." AI can probe: What specifically about the project? Was it the subject matter, the team, the autonomy, the challenge level, the novelty, the deadline pressure? Which of those conditions, if removed, would have made the experience ordinary? The value is not "I liked the project." The value is the specific cocktail of conditions that made it a peak experience — and AI is relentlessly good at forcing that specificity.
But the raw material must come from you. AI cannot tell you what your peak experiences are. It can only help you analyze experiences you have already identified and externalized. The capture practice — the weekly Peak Experience Log — is the prerequisite that makes AI-assisted values identification possible.
From peak experiences to a working values system
This lesson gives you one of the most powerful inputs to value identification: the felt evidence of your own most meaningful moments. The next lesson, on how resentment reveals violated values, gives you the complementary signal — the negative indicator that shows where your values are being denied.
Together, peak experiences and resentment form a dual signal system: the positive signal shows you what you move toward, the negative signal shows you what you cannot tolerate losing. Neither alone is sufficient. A person who only analyzes peak experiences may miss values that are so deeply held they are invisible until threatened. A person who only analyzes resentment may build a values system defined entirely by avoidance.
But you start here — with the positive signal — because it is the more reliable entry point. Peak experiences are vivid, memorable, and specific. They are harder to rationalize away than resentment, which can always be dismissed as "being too sensitive" or "having a bad day." Your peak experiences are your values made visible. The work is learning to read what they are telling you.