What does it mean that the values hierarchy?

When values conflict, you need a hierarchy — a clear ordering that tells you which value takes precedence when they cannot both be satisfied simultaneously.

Example: You value both career ambition and being present for your family. A promotion arrives that requires relocating to another city, uprooting your children mid-school-year. Inside your head, both values scream at equal volume. But if you have already established that family stability is lexically prior to career advancement — meaning you satisfy family stability first before optimizing for career — the decision is still painful, but it is not paralyzing. You decline the promotion, and you know why. Without the hierarchy, you agonize for weeks, flip back and forth, and whichever choice you make feels like a betrayal of the other.

Try this: List your top seven values. Now force-rank them by asking the hierarchy question for each adjacent pair: 'If I could only fully honor one of these two, which would I choose?' Work through all pairs until you have a strict ordering from most to least important. Then test the ranking: pick a real decision you faced in the past six months and check whether the hierarchy would have produced the choice you actually made. If not, either the hierarchy is wrong or the choice was — and both are useful to discover.