Is Your Prime Directives Matching with What You Do?
We humans are governed by our prime directives. I call them that, but they are also known as the primary values that are directing us from what we do or not. Having these values means that not all kinds of work, career or industry will be a good fit for a person. This is why sometimes a person can be reluctant to accept a job offer even if it’s really good. This is why a person can leave an organisation with an answer like “it doesn’t fit“.
Would it be good to understand these values? Of course it is! Understanding the prime directives means that we’ll be able to choose the correct career or be able to build or be in a team which respects our values. Furthermore, it is also good to understand these directives if you wish to improve yourselves. Perhaps your prime directives are the ones that blocks you from improving through a certain means. Knowing them means that you’ll be able to use a different improvement plans.
It’s Like Robocop
Robocop (the classic) is one of my favourite movies of all time. This movie really shows what it means to be human. Of course the difference is that Murphy had his prime directives laid out in front of him while ours exist within our heads. Though in the movie he did discover one that he didn’t know existed.
In the movie his prime directives are
- “Serve the public trust”
- “Protect the innocent”
- “Uphold the law”
- “Any attempt to arrest a senior OCP employee results in shutdown” (he didn’t know he had this…)
This prevented him from doing a lot of things but it also drives him to do what he thinks he needs to do.
Prime directives are real, we all have them within ourselves. Basically we receive information from our surroundings, our brain process them and we filter those information via our prime directives which then governs our decision making.
If you are in your early teens, it’s still possible to change or mold these directives. However if you are already past 20 years old, there is little chance for a change. You can reduce the impact, but you can’t change it, it’ll always be there.
Finding Our Prime Directives
The best way to do this is to find your values. These are the things that makes you say “I shouldn’t do this” or “I should do this”.
The values are not things or items. In English term they are mostly noun.
Here’s how you can find your prime directives:
- List out 10-20 of your values.
eg. honesty, transparency, sense of family, loyalty, knowledge, kindness, respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, freedom, etc - Pick your top three.
These are the values that would make you leave a team, a company or a business if they go against them. - Test out your top three. Create a hypothetical situation for each of them.
So for example: if one of your top three is a sense of family but you are in an organisation where everyone’s KPI (key performance indicator) goes against one another, then you won’t be in that organisation for long.
If you think you can live with it then repeat from step 1 again to find the true prime directives
What’s Next?
Once you found your prime directives, ask yourself, is your current career conducive to those directives? Is the current business that you are in or running falls within your prime directives?
The rest is really your own decisions. Whether you stay and make a change to your environments so that they are more conducive or go to a different place where it’s more conducive. Either way, each of us have to make the right choices of ourselves and our careers.
Hopefully this post help out anyone why feels uncertain about their career or have that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite matching up.