Helping others.

Not just traditional volunteering but teaching others, assisting co-workers, helping around the house, etc.

If you don’t help (at work, home, whatever), you will never gain my respect. Money and/or social status do not change that fact.

"Value" doesn't describe an inherent quality of a person. Value comes from how a person interacts with other people, their family, their job, their community. A person doesn't "demonstrate" value, rather you perceive value from your interaction with them.

Facebook provides obvious value to advertisers. Facebook employees (at least some of them) makes the actual work to make that happen.

etc.

Creating public goods, be it by volunteering, supporting/creating open projects, institutions or standards or providing educational resources, making inventions or improving social, technological or scientific understanding or discovery

Money isn't value, it's an arbitrary resource allocation tool. Human economies have existed long before money came about. Money is rooted in the authority of the state to deny people the right to control their own property. For most of human history money has been in the hands of the people who provide the least value to the rest of us. No matter what we call them (aristocrat, capitalist, etc.) they're more or less the human version of a parasite, a bottomless pit, constant attrition on humanity.

People are valuable to each other in different ways depending on your own personal values. Personally, I value people more who (in no particular order):

- have a willingness to help others without recognition or reward

- have a desire to learn and change/improve oneself

- have a well-informed set of personal values

- are willing to contribute to the community

- lack greed or addiction to consumerism

- are willing to do the difficult tasks

- reject the idea of holding power over others

- reject ideas of personal or demographic superiority

For me value is only an economic consideration. Specifically, value is the creation of profit where profit is not necessarily money. Profit can be time, enjoyment, increased production capacity, and so forth. Profit can be achieved by any combination of cost reduction and/or increase of output.

Perhaps the single greatest value add delivered by a person is through simplicity. When there are only two things to consider the clearest path forward is a straight line between the two points. When there are more than two things, as is almost always the case, the path forward is less clear. More challenging still is that this is a calculus problem, artifacts in continuous states of transition, as opposed to algebra problem of fixed data points.

When there are many variables at play the clearest path forward is often lost. It takes a brilliant person to find that clearer path, and thus add value. Brilliance is the most appropriate combination of qualities that provides for the best solution and is not necessarily higher intelligence. As Paul Graham would say this is often counter-intuitive to what you would expect or what might appear obvious.

Some of my relatives were minimum wage cook/babysitters at a preschool. Without the preschool, a lot of moms would have to stop working to take care of their kids.

Most preschools here provide minimum care and nutrition. They'd beat crying kids until the kids fall asleep. Food would be porridge, with a budget of one whole chicken per month. They end up undernourished with no love. They learn to hate school. They end up underproductive and often dangerous because they loathe everything associated with school - math, science, literature, work. Some end up hating authority.

My wife quit her engineering job to do a preschool. It was a large salary drop, but economically, it meant other moms could work. One of those moms ended up landing a huge deal in Mexico, enough for retirement and enough for her husband to quit his job. She probably couldn't have done that if she had to be a stay at home mom.

I pay more for my kids' early education than I paid for my college education, because I want them to know that learning can be fun, even if it's just the first few years. But to get that, I think the teachers themselves need to be paid pretty good rates.

Simply put, it's anyone/anything that saves me more time/effort than it costs

My local small engine shop provides value by servicing my mower cheaper than I can myself (and while I continue doing other things)

My dishwasher provides value because I'm not stuck doing the dishes

My colleagues provide value by giving me data I need faster than I can find it, or by doing something I cannot

Etc etc