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People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.
theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs
Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions.
Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.
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.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is 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 will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
“To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”
“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.
No one intentionally deserted him in his hour of need; it was just that he had neglected them for so long that they no longer felt close to him and they worried that any intervention might be considered an intrusion.
If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.
Given that sacrifice deepens our commitment, it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment,
But how could they have known? The answer lies in understanding the concept of “capabilities.” You need to understand what capabilities are, and which of them will be critical to the future, to know which capabilities are important to keep in-house and which matter less.
Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
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.
self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.
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.”
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.
Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives.
The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.
Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.
