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nwthomas comments on Knowing what you want is a prerequisite to getting what you want - Less Wrong
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While this approach may not have been discussed on Lesswrong before, it is a foundational part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (aka ACT).
Specifically, ACT advises people to make choices based on experientially-based terminal values. That is, on things that you value doing or experiencing, rather than on states of the world or states of your mind. This is a bit stricter than the approach you're laying out here, in that an ACT therapist would probably not accept "Money" as a valid "value" in ACT's terms. He/she would want to know what you will want to do, once you have the money.
To put it another way, ACT basically says we screw up our motivation because we direct our attention to goals that are not directly connected to experiencing our terminal values... which I believe is pretty close to what you're saying here, is it not?
It is pretty close, and even insofar as it's different, I think I agree with it. I'm not particularly a fan of the idea of "we can have values over states of the external world," because it seems to me that most, if not all, of our actual terminal values are mental states. In my opinion, if you think you have a value over a state of the external world, this is probably a case where you've misunderstood what your values are.
This of course is not a necessary truth about minds-in-general. I am not suggesting that all possible minds would only value mental states; rather, I am suggesting that this happens to be true of human minds.
Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, I'd be happy to disconnect from my body and the external world, and spend an eternity exploring various possible mental states, as long as there were other disembodied consciousnesses there to share the experience with me.
I value placing value in the external world. I think that having "value" as a synonym for "motivation", "pleasure", "wanting" etc. is not valuable. In my conception, values are not biological givens, but are constructions, empirically grounded in "pleasure", "wanting", "what is awesome" and "what works".