How will you measure your life
How will you measure your life
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon
How Will You Measure Your Life is a book that makes you pause and reflect on your work, your relationships, and your values. I first came across Clayton M. Christensen through his other, more famous book called The Innovator’s Dilemma which popularized the concept of Disruption theory. I got a chance to read How Will You Measure Your Life last month over many cups of coffee, and would highly recommend it. What follows are my favorite lines/quotes from the book —it consists of three parts:
Finding happiness in your career
The theory of motivation suggests that you ask yourself the following questions: Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to learn? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you, not the more measurable aspects like your salary or your title. Don’t chase a mirage by focussing on those more tangible measures — instead find out what makes you tick.
Balancing emergent and deliberate strategies is important — you should be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and motivates you. Only then does a deliberate strategy makes sense. If you’ve yet to find something that really works in your career, expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities.
Finally, how you allocate your resources of time, money, and energy decides what path you’re on — not just merely talking about it. Watch where your resources flow — if your resource allocation process is not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing your strategy at all. “If the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.”
Finding happiness in your relationships
“Your relationships with your family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it’s often too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, that the time when it’s most important to invest is when it appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary.” We’re constantly tempted to divert our time and resources to things that give us immediate payoffs, and our family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand our attention. These two things add up to neglecting the people you care about the most in the world.
A powerful way to deepen your relationships is to change your perspective from thinking about what we want to understand what is important to the other person. What’s usually missing is empathy. Ask yourself “What job does my spouse most need me to do?” And then devote your time and energy to the effort, suppress your own priorities and desires, and focus on doing what is required to make the other person happy. In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.
The theory of capabilities suggests that children need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems and develop values. If you find yourself handing your children over to other people like tutors or coaches to give them all these experiences — outsourcing — you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you’re not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities.
Coping with a difficult teacher, failing at a sport, learning to navigate the complex social structure of cliques of school — all these things become “courses” in the school of experience. The natural tendency of many parents is to focus on building their child’s resumé: good grades, sports successes, and so on. But it would be a mistake to neglect the “courses,” or the right experiences that help them build the skills they’ll need to succeed in life.
Be intentional about building the right family culture. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? Culture is like an auto-pilot, and for it to be an effective force, you have to program it right. If you do not consciously build it and reinforce it from the earliest stages of your family life, a culture will still form — but it will form in ways you may not like. Although it’s difficult for a parent to always be consistent and remember to give their children positive feedback when they do something right, it’s in these everyday interactions that your culture is being set. And once that happens, it’s almost impossible to change.
Staying out of jail
To live a life of integrity, understand the importance of full versus marginal thinking. Most of us face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. Marginal thinking will make us compromise our values, thinking that it’s a one-off thing. But over time, these seemingly innocuous decisions can play out far more dramatically. 100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent of the time. The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is never to start making them in the first place.
Christensen wrote this book at a time of intense personal reflection — he had just recovered from the same type of cancer that had taken his father’s life. I liked how he and his co-authors used various theories and examples from the business world to present the parallels in our everyday life, career, and families. I’m a huge advocate of running your life like a business— complete with thinking of yourself as a product and having correct metrics in place to measure you’re headed down the right path. This book is full of inspiration and wisdom, and I highly recommend it.
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking and remarkably personal book, Clayton Christensen and his coauthors James Allworth and Karen Dillon put forth a series of fundamental questions everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives:
Using lessons from some of the world’s greatest businesses, applying his theories about disruptive innovation, and drawing personal examples from his own life, Christensen and his coauthors seek to answer these questions by presenting a way for each of us to think about our lives and find the satisfaction, happiness, and direction necessary for a successful and happy future.
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«One of the more surprisingly powerful books of personal philosophy of the 21st century.»
«The book encapsulates Christensen’s best advice to keep high achievers from being disrupted in their own lives. Provocative but reassuring: Peter Drucker meets Mitch Albom.»
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Стратегия жизни
О чем
Почему так часто погоня за должностями и зарплатами не приносит счастья? Почему близкие не понимают нас? Почему цели, к которым мы стремимся, часто не приносят ничего, кроме разочарования? Эти и многие другие вопросы возникли у гуру менеджмента Клейтона Кристенсена после нескольких встреч выпускников Гарвардской школы бизнеса.
Он обнаружил, что за внешними атрибутами успеха большинство его коллег глубоко несчастны. Но почему же эти умные люди, разрабатывающие стратегии огромных корпораций, не справились со стратегией своей жизни?
Вместо того чтобы давать готовые советы, Кристенсен и его соавторы предлагают нам использовать известные теории менеджмента, которые очень просто спроецировать на свою жизнь.
На примере известных компаний в книге показано, какие ошибки мы совершаем, неправильно распределяя свои ресурсы. Авторы рассматривают все стороны жизни, от которых зависит наше счастье.
Особенности
Для кого
Эта книга для тех, кто хочет изменить свою жизнь к лучшему и уберечь себя от роковых ошибок.
Ключевые понятия
Профессор в Гарвардской школе бизнеса, автор девяти книг, пятикратный лауреат Премии Маккинзи за лучшую статью Harvard Business Review и соучредитель четырех компаний, включая Innosight, консалтинговую фирму, занимающуюся инновациями.
В 2011 и 2013 годах был назван наиболее влиятельным мыслителем бизнес-сферы в рейтинге Thinkers50, который составляется каждые два года.
Бывший редактор Harvard Business Review и соавтор бестселлера The New York Times «Стратегия жизни».
Выпускница Корнеллского университета и школы журналистики Медилла Северо-Западного университета.
В 2011 года фонд Ashoka назвал ее самой влиятельной и вдохновляющей женщиной мира.
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How Will You Measure Your Life?
Harvard Business School’s Christensen teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes that these models can help people lead better lives. In this article, he explains how, exploring questions everyone needs to ask: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity?
The answer to the first question comes from Frederick Herzberg’s assertion that the most powerful motivator isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute, and be recognized. That’s why management, if practiced well, can be the noblest of occupations; no others offer as many ways to help people find those opportunities. It isn’t about buying, selling, and investing in companies, as many think.
The principles of resource allocation can help people attain happiness at home. If not managed masterfully, what emerges from a firm’s resource allocation process can be very different from the strategy management intended to follow. That’s true in life too: If you’re not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you’re likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-term signs of achievement, not what’s really important to you.
And just as a focus on marginal costs can cause bad corporate decisions, it can lead people astray. The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. You don’t see the end result to which that path leads. The key is to define what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.
Editor’s note (2010): When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.
The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”
How Will You Measure Your Life Summary
1-Sentence-Summary: How Will You Measure Your Life shows you how to sustain motivation at work and in life to spend your time on earth happily and fulfilled, by focusing not just on money and your career, but your family, relationships and personal well-being.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Audio Summary
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Clayton M. Christensen is the world’s leading authority on innovation, most notably due to his all-time classic “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” just about the only business book Steve Jobs ever thought was valuable to him.
How Will You Measure Your Life is more geared towards helping you balance professional life with, well, the rest of it. It points out that counterintuitively, taking time away from work for family, relationships, etc. can have a huge positive impact on your career and happiness – in the long run.
Because these benefits take a long time to shine through, it’s hard to invest the time right now and trust the process, and this is where the book can help.
Here are my 3 favorite lessons:
Ready to find a new measure for your life? Here we go!
Lesson 1: Relationships constantly require your attention – even when it doesn’t seem like it.
Do you sometimes avoid going to family birthdays? Have you ever felt happy some important work thing happened right at the same time, and gave you a good excuse not to go?
Deep in our hearts, you and I know that the relationships with the people closest to us – our best friends and family – are the biggest source of our happiness. So why don’t we always dedicate the time they need to them?
There are two reasons for this:
In a sense, great relationships are a paradox: they need consistent dedication and lots of effort, even when it seems like they don’t.
It might seem like you can compensate less family time now for more later, but the truth is damage done early can hardly be repaired in later years.
Lesson 2: Build intuition and empathy by thinking of your family life as a job.
So what’s one thing you can do to instantly improve your relationships and give them the attention they deserve? How about treating them like a job?
Wait, what?! Yup, that’s right! Ironically, thinking of your relationships like you do about the thing you’re supposed to give up a bit of – work – will actually make you better at them.
Here’s the single-best question you can ask to improve any relationship: “What job does X need me to do the most?”
X is the person in question. Could be your best friend, your dad, your family as a whole, or your partner. This flips the relationship on its head, approaching it from their perspective, instead of yours, and forces you to dig deep. It helps understand the other party better and then come up with good ways to fulfill their needs.
The more often you do this, the better you’ll become at intuitively guessing what your spouse or son needs, which is a great recipe for a flourishing and loyal relationship.
Lesson 3: Avoid the trap of marginal thinking.
One relationship we mustn’t neglect in all this is the one you have with yourself. A really easy way to protect it at all times is to live with integrity. If your conscience is clear, you’ll feel good about decisions you make and actions you take, and that’s what makes those work out.
For most people, integrity is the default setting. Where we wander off the path of doing what’s right is where it gets icky. How can you avoid compromising your integrity?
Simple: recognize marginal thinking and don’t engage in it. What’s marginal thinking? It’s when all you think about are the “edges” of the situation.
For example, Blockbuster was the incumbent in the movie rental market for a long time. One day, a little company called Netflix started sending out DVDs via mail and had customers return them that way. Weirdos! Because they didn’t want to pay the marginal costs of adding this service to their own portfolio of products, Blockbuster ended up paying the ultimate price instead: they went bankrupt in 2010.
The same thing happens with morals. For example, many bankers in 2007 and 2008 thought it wouldn’t hurt if they covered their mortgage loans’s bad credibility “just this once,” which of course completely spiraled and ended with the world financial crisis. Because they didn’t want to pay the marginal price of sucking up to a bad decision immediately, they completely lost their integrity in the long run.
Simply recognizing when you’re thinking marginally can make a huge difference and will help you avoid making decisions just to avoid consequences of others you’ve made previously.
How Will You Measure Your Life Review
I like How Will You Measure Your Life. The book’s statement is not one you hear often these days. Less work, more family! I think I needed to hear that myself. Already reached out to some friends and will delete some contacts from my phone who aren’t valuable relationships and only take away from the important ones. A recommended read!
Who would I recommend the How Will You Measure Your Life summary to?
The 35 year old successful manager, who wants to start a family, but is really going for his career right now, the 55 year old working wife, who hasn’t seen a lot of her childhood friends in a long time, and anyone who has given in to the temptation to do something “just this once” before.
This book has an average rating of 4.5 based on 2 votes.