How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Many of us thrive on the intensity of a demanding job—one that we believe in and enjoy. We like proving what we can do under pressure.

So true

“I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.” Guess what. By that time the game is already over. An investment in a child needs to have been made long before then, to provide him with the tools he needs to survive life’s challenges—even earlier than you might realize.

0-5 years brah

“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.

Interesting data point

In contrast, when parents engaged in face-to-face conversation with the child—speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be part of a chatty, grown-up conversation—the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interactions they called “language dancing.”

It’s mind-boggling to think that such a tiny investment has the potential for such enormous returns.

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late. But as you are getting your career off the ground, you will be tempted to do exactly that: assume you can defer investing in your personal relationships. You cannot. The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them.

All investment must come in parallel

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done.

Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel success every day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero.

are kids the right customer? Or is it society that is using school to get a job done

If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous.

It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong. A husband may be convinced that he is the selfless one, and also convinced that his wife is being self-centered because she doesn’t even notice everything he is giving her—and vice versa.

This may sound counterintuitive, but I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

This principle—that sacrifice deepens our commitment—doesn’t just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations.

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

When you boil it down, the factors that determine what a company can and cannot do—its capabilities—fall into one of three buckets: resources, processes, and priorities.

Equal CapabIlities

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

You want to help your kids discover something that they truly enjoy doing, and it’s actually critical for them to find something that will motivate them to develop their own processes.

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?

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.

I guess the thing to learn from this is that children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”

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

Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent.

Obviously, it will help a lot if you can work out which courses will be important for you to master before you need them.

You’re doing what Nolan Archibald did, working out what courses your child will need to be successful and then reverse engineering the right experiences. Encourage them to stretch—to aim for lofty goals. If they don’t succeed, make sure you’re there to help them learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make

Good point here

They haven’t really learned anything from them.

Two questions to always ask: 1) What have I learned 2) What have I contributed/accomplished

Before long, this value became embedded in our family’s culture; but it wasn’t by magic or good luck. It was achieved by thoughtfully designing activities and doing simple things like mowing the lawn together. We tried to be consistent about it; we made sure the kids knew why we were doing it; and we always thanked them for it.

You have to consciously work throughout the years your children are young to help them see “success” in the things you want to be part of your culture.

Doing this does require constant vigilance about what is right and wrong. For every action a family member takes, imagine that it will happen all the time.

It’s not just about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, “Well done”?

What would be the best way for us to serve our customers?”

The reason, I think, is that we took time in the class to discuss how critical it is to articulate the purpose of our lives.

useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is what I will call a likeness.

Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitment—almost a conversion—to the likeness that they are trying to create.

The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress. These metrics enable everyone associated with the enterprise to calibrate their work, keeping them moving together in a coherent way.

Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.

When that is in place, however, then how the company gets there is typically emergent—as opportunities and challenges emerge and are pursued.

Finally, please remember that this is a process, not an event. It took me years to fully understand my own purpose.

But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. This is the most valuable, useful piece of knowledge that I have ever gained.

For the first time in my life, I became focused on myself and on my problems.

The more I focused on my problems, the less energy I had to get better.

Was I actually allocating my resources to the things that mattered most to me? Did I have a strategy for my life? Did I have a purpose? How would I measure my life?