Core value · Beauty family
Beauty
Noticing and creating what is beautiful
Also covers Aesthetics
What does beauty mean as a core value?
Beauty as a core value means noticing, seeking out and creating things that move you through their form, colour or harmony, and treating that as a real need in your life.
You notice the light on a wet street, the shape of a well-set table, a sentence that lands perfectly. For you, beauty affects how you feel and how well you think. You’re drawn to aesthetics in places others overlook, like a cleanly laid-out spreadsheet or a garden in late autumn, and you often want to add something beautiful to the world yourself. An ugly environment wears on you in a way that’s hard to explain.
What does beauty look like in practice?
- You rearrange a room until it feels right, even if nobody else can say what changed.
- You stop on a walk to look properly at something.
- You spend time on the design of a document that could have been plain.
- You buy flowers, art or music even when money is tight.
- You take a longer route home because it’s more beautiful.
When is beauty overplayed?
A strong eye for beauty can make ordinary life frustrating. Clutter, bad design and dull spaces drain you, and you can spend a lot of time or money trying to fix them. Others may feel judged by your taste, and substance can get less attention than surface. The steadier form treats beauty as nourishment, and finds it in imperfect and unfinished things too. You could try looking for one beautiful thing each day in something worn or half done, and letting that count.
Often confused with
Beauty vs Elegance
Elegance is beauty through graceful simplicity. Beauty is broader and can be rich, wild or ornate.
Beauty vs Style
Style is a distinctive way of doing things. Beauty is the quality that moves you, whether or not it’s anyone’s signature.
Beauty vs Wonder
Wonder is awe at what is vast or mysterious. Beauty is pleasure in form, colour and harmony, often in small things.
Questions to sit with
- Where in your daily life is beauty missing, and what would it take to add some?
- What do you find beautiful that other people walk straight past?
- When has caring how something looks got in the way of what it needed to do?
More values in Beauty
Aesthetics, quality and style.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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