How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all.

Periodically, as we were all considering our postgraduation plans, we’d try to keep ourselves honest, challenging each other: “What about doing something important, or something you really love? Isn’t that why you came here?” “Don’t worry,” came back the answer. “This is just for a couple of years. I’ll pay off my loans, get myself in a good financial position, then I’ll go chase my real dreams.”

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

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. In some ways, the awards are really for the parents—it is often we who get the most out of seeing the accumulation of medals and ribbons. It sure feels better to congratulate our kids on their achievements than it does to console them for a tough failure. In fact, it’s very tempting for many parents to step in to ensure that their child is always succeeding. But what are they getting from that?

If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. 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.