How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Behind the facade of professional success, there were many who did not enjoy what they were doing for a living.

We all are vulnerable to the forces and decisions that have derailed too many.

But the three of us are united in the goal of helping you understand the theories we share in this book because we believe they can sharpen the acuity with which you can examine and improve your life.

There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life.

disruption happens when a competitor enters a market with a low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior. But the new competitor uses technology and its business model to continually improve its offering until it is good enough to satisfy what customers need.

But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.

If we can’t see beyond what’s close by, we’re relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.

It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.

Asking Bruce to do this makes sense in isolation. But getting Bruce to actually make this his highest priority, on top of an overflowing plate of other responsibilities—isn’t that going to be hard?”

Back in 1976, two economists, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published a paper that has been committed to memory by those in the first camp.

agency theory, or incentive theory:

The root cause, as Jensen and Meckling saw it, is that people work in accordance with how you pay them. The

One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain.

You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.

this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that

Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, called it “discovery-driven planning,”

Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain.

Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing? What evidence do you have? Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid.

While you are still figuring out your career, you should keep the aperture of your life wide open.

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 gives you all the motivators.

Goodwin thought that he was giving clear instructions into the salesman’s ear. But the compensation system was shouting the opposite instructions into his other ear.

where the rubber meets the road.

In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”

Here is a way to frame the investments that we make in the strategy that becomes our lives: we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives.

The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.

Hmm..

With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.

Good reminder

Because 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.

The person you are at work and the amount of time you spend there will impact the person you are outside of work with your family and close friends.

I’ve had to force myself to stay aligned with what matters most to me by setting hard stops, barriers, and boundaries in my life—such as leaving the office at six every day so that there is daylight time to play catch with my son, or to take my daughter to a ballet lesson—to keep myself true to what I most value.

you’ll know that getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

Each of us can point to one or two friendships we’ve unintentionally neglected when life got busy. You might be hoping that the bonds of your friendship are strong enough to endure such neglect, but that’s seldom the case. Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else.

People in their later years in life so often lament that they didn’t keep in better touch with friends and relatives who once mattered profoundly to them. Life just seemed to get in the way. The consequences of letting that happen, however, can be enormous. I’ve known too many people like Steve, who have had to walk through a health struggle or a divorce or a job loss alone—with nobody to provide a sounding board or other means of support.

Todd Risley and Betty Hart, studied the effects of how parents talk to a child during the first two and a half years of life. After meticulously observing and recording all of the interactions between parent and child, they noticed that on average, parents speak 1,500 words per hour to their infant children. “Talkative” (often college-educated) parents spoke 2,100 words to their child, on average. By contrast, parents from less verbal (and often less-educated) backgrounds spoke only 600 per hour, on average. If you add that up over the first thirty months, the child of

“talkative” parents heard an estimated 48 million words spoken, compared to the disadvantaged child, who heard only 13 million. The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life. Risley and Hart’s research followed the children they studied as they progressed through school. The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older.

And it didn’t matter that just any words were spoken to a child—the way a parent spoke to a child had a significant effect. The researchers observed two different types of conversations between parents and infants. One type they dubbed “business language”—such as, “Time for a nap,” “Let’s go for a ride,” and “Finish your milk.” Such conversations were simple...

had limited effect on cognitive ...

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care.

The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

The same is true in our relationships: we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.

Ingvar Kamprad,

When a company understands the jobs that arise in people’s lives, and then develops products and the accompanying experiences required in purchasing and using the product to do the job perfectly, it causes customers to instinctively “pull” the product into their lives whenever the job arises. But when a company simply makes a product that other companies also can make—and is a product that can do lots of jobs but none of them well—it will find that customers are rarely loyal to one product versus another.

There is no way that we can motivate children to work harder in class by convincing them that they should do this. Rather, we need to offer children experiences in school that help them do these jobs—to feel successful and do it with friends.

Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel success every day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero. When structured to do the job of success, students eagerly master difficult material—because in doing so, they are getting the job done.

It’s easy for any of us to make assumptions about what our spouse might want, rather than work hard to understand the job to be done in our spouse’s life.

It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong.

the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

what cements that commitment is the extent to which I