How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Set against this backdrop, a little upstart called Netflix emerged in the 1990s

It was a bold move: Netflix was the quintessential David going up against the Goliath of the movie rental industry.

build a brand.” Hence, the paradox: Why is it that the big, established companies that have so much capital find these initiatives to be so costly?

The answer is in the theory of marginal versus full costs.

The first step down that path is taken with a small decision. You justify all the small decisions that lead up to the big one and then you get to the big one and it doesn’t seem so enormous anymore.

theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, I realize that resisting the temptation of “in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay” has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.

The likeness—the person I want to become—was the simplest of the three parts, and was largely an intellectual process.

to understand the kind of person I want to become—which,

Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” He might have let me think I was helping him, but in reality, it has always

And to my husband, Richard Perez, and my daughters, Rebecca and Emma, who endured dramatic changes in their own lives to support my work on this book and my quest to reset

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