How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.

that sacrifice deepens our commitment—doesn’t

“Semper Fi”—Always Faithful—bumper

it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment,

In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.

But helping our children in this way can come at a high cost.

resources, processes, and priorities.

In the absence of work, we’ve created a generation of parents who selflessly devote themselves to providing their children with enriching experiences—so-called soccer moms, a term that wasn’t even part of the American lexicon until fifteen years ago. They lovingly cart children around to soccer, lacrosse, basketball, football, hockey, and baseball teams; dance, gymnastics, music, and Chinese lessons; send them on a semester abroad to London;

But that’s not always the impetus of parents imposing these activities on their children’s lives. Parents have their own job to be done, and it can overshadow the desire to help their children develop processes. They have a job of wanting to feel like a good parent: see all the opportunities I’m providing for my child?

parents, often with their heart in the right place, project their own hopes and dreams onto their children. When these other intentions start creeping in, and parents seem to be carting their children around to an endless array of activities in which the kids are not truly engaged, it should start to raise red flags. Are the children developing from these experiences the deep, important processes such as teamwork, entrepreneurship, and learning the value of preparation? Or are they just going along for the ride? When we so heavily focus on providing our children

with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences? These are the critical differences between resources and processes in our childr...

Many parents are making the same mistake, flooding their children with resources—knowledge, skills, and experiences. And just as with Dell, each of the decisions to do so seems to make sense. We want our kids to get ahead, and believe that the opportunities and experiences we have provided for them will help them do exactly that.

But the nature of these activities—experiences in which they’re not deeply engaged and that don’t really challenge them to do hard things—denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they’ll need to succeed in the future.

By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.

Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement.

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.

children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”

we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.

There’s a wonderful conundrum left to us by the Greeks. It was first put to print by the author Plutarch, and it’s known as the Ship of Theseus.

As a tribute to the mythical founder of their city—famed for slaying the Minotaur—the Athenians committed to keeping Theseus’s ship seaworthy in the harbor of Athens. As parts of the boat decayed, they were replaced … until eventually, every last part of the boat had been changed. The conundrum was this: given that every last part of it had been replaced, was it still Theseus’s ship? The Athenians still called it Theseus’s Ship … but was it?

I want to turn that into a similar philosophical question for you: if your children gain their priorities and values from oth...

Rather, the point is that even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all.

Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They

need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people 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.

Most of the books I read assumed the choices that one successful company had made would work for everyone. “If you hire the types of people that successful company XYZ Inc. did—then you will be successful, too.” That’s a bad way to develop theory. In fact, it’s not theory at all. Most of these conclusions are based on anecdotes and hearsay.

Morgan McCall, a professor at the University of Southern California, in a book called High Flyers,

While Wolfe’s fighter pilots may indeed have been the best of the best, McCall’s theory gives a causal explanation of why. It wasn’t because they were born with superior skills. Instead, it was because they had honed them along the way, by having experiences that taught them how to deal with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations.

McCall’s schools of experience model asks whether they have actually flown, and if so, in what circumstances.

it is a search for process capabilities.

Unlike the “right stuff” model, McCall’s thinking is not based on the idea that great leaders are born ready to go. Rather, their abilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life. A challenging job, a failure in leading a project, an assignment in a new area of the company—all those things become “courses” in the school of experience.

Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough. Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child striving for an out-of-reach goal.

From a very young age, many of our children who participate in sports come to expect medals, trophies, or ribbons at the end of a season—simply for participating.

Those medals and awards end up in a pile in a corner of their bedroom over the years and quickly become meaningless to those kids. They haven’t really learned anything from them.

Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment.

Like in the example with our hiring managers at the start of this chapter, it’s

tempting to judge success by a résumé—by looking at the scoreboard of what our children have achieved. But much more important in the long run is what courses our kids have taken as they’ve gone through the various schools of experience. More than any award or trophy, this is the best way to equip them for success as they venture out into the world.

But as MIT’s Edgar Schein—one of the world’s leading scholars on organizational culture—explains, those things don’t define a culture. They’re just artifacts of it. An office that allows T-shirts and shorts could also be a very hierarchical place.

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. Those

Every time they tackle a problem, employees aren’t just solving the problem itself; in solving it, they are learning what matters.

A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization.

If these paradigms of how to work together, and of what things should be given priority over other things, are used successfully over and over again, ultimately employees won’t stop and ask each other how they should work together.

They will just assume that the way they have been doing it is the way of doing it. The advantage of this is that it effectively causes an organization to become self-managing.

Culture in any organization is formed through repetition.

Many companies see the value in assertively shaping their culture—so that the culture, rather than the managers, causes the right things to happen.

it’s not uncommon to see a company release a document about culture, and then completely fail to live up to it.

If you don’t articulate a culture—or articulate one but don’t enforce it—then a culture is still going to emerge. However, it is going to be based on the processes and priorities that have been repeated within the organization and have worked.

Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but that’s exactly why it’s so important to understand what type of culture you want and to proactively pursue it.

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not.

in the late 1990s, Blockbuster dominated the movie rental industry.