How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise,

A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others.

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.

You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant.

In order 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.

In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.

If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense.

“What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control?

As difficult as it may seem, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing.

“To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”

Intending to build a satisfying personal life alongside their professional life, making choices specifically to provide a better life for their family, they unwittingly overlook their spouse and children.

Investing time and energy in these relationships doesn’t offer them that same immediate sense of achievement that a fast-track career does. You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. Your spouse is still there when you get home every night. And kids find new ways to misbehave all the time. It’s really not until twenty years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “We raised good kids.”

In fact, you’ll often see the same sobering pattern when looking at the personal lives of many ambitious people. Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and...

Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. If it is not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, you run the risk of a serious problem.

If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top?

Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.

In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home.

Whenever it is that you’re dealing with other human beings, it’s not always possible to control how things turn out; nowhere is this more true than with children.

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. They are worth fighting for.

When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit.

He sought the returns on an investment he hadn’t made. 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.

what matters most in the darkest hours of George Bailey’s life are the many personal relationships he has invested in along the way. He recognizes, by the end of the film, that though he is poor, his life is rich in friendships. We all want to feel like George Bailey—but that simply isn’t possible if we haven’t done the work investing in those relationships with friends and family throughout our lives.

Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else. If they do, the loss will be yours.

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

This is just one of the many ways in which investments in relationships with friends and family need to be made long, long before you’ll see any sign that they are paying off. If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care.

there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention.

The insight behind this way of thinking is that what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.

If a company has developed a product or service to do the job well, we buy, or “hire” it, to do the job. If there isn’t an existing product that does the job well, however, then we typically make something we already have, get it done as best we can, or develop a work-around. The mechanism that causes us to buy a product is “I have a job I need to get done, and this is going to help me do it.”

an hour away, but this decision actually makes it much easier for people to get everything they need in one trip. It lets IKEA build a bigger store to ensure its furniture is always in stock. It has the space to build a supervised play area to keep the kids occupied—which is important because having a child tugging at your sleeve might cause you to forget something or rush through a decision. In case you get hungry, IKEA has a restaurant in the building so you don’t have to leave. Its products are all flat-packed so that you can get them home quickly and easily in your own car. If you happen to buy so much that you can’t fit it all in your car, IKEA has same-day delivery.

I suspect that if we studied marriage from the job-to-be-done lens, we would find that the husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.

By working to truly understand the job she needs done, and doing it well, I can cause myself to fall more deeply in love with my spouse, and, I hope, her with me.

the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. If what causes us to fall deeply in love is mutually understanding and then doing each other’s job to be done, then I have observed that what cements that commitment is the extent to which I sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.

It’s natural to want the people you love to be happy. What can often be difficult is understanding what your role is in that.

He and his wife (I’ll call them Jim and Norma) had raised a wonderful family. Each of their five children turned out to be very different from one another.

“When the kids come home for a family reunion, I like to listen to their banter back and forth about the experiences they had growing up, and which had the greatest impact on their lives. I typically have no memory of the events they recall as being important. And when I ask them about the times when Jim and I sat them down specifically to share what we thought were foundationally important values of our family, well, the kids have no memory of any of them. 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.”

the importance of building the third of the capabilities—priorities. It affects what our children will put first in their lives. In fact, it may be the single most important capability we can give our kids.

Your parents most likely weren’t thinking consciously about teaching you the right priorities at the time—but simply because they were there with you in those learning moments, those values became your values, too. Which means that first, when children are ready to learn, we need to be there.

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

in outsourcing much of the work that formerly filled our homes, we have created a void in our children’s lives that often gets filled with activities in which we are not involved. And as a result, when our children are ready to learn, it is ofte...

They may strive for zero-defect quality in manufacturing or services, but a 25-percent “defect” rate in picking the right people—what many consider their most important responsibility—is somehow considered acceptable.

What he described was not all of the steps on his résumé, but rather why he took them.

“What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”

Instead of taking jobs or assignments because they looked like a fast-track to the C-suite, he chose his options very deliberately for the experience they would provide. “I wouldn’t ever make the decision based upon how much it paid or the prestige,” he told my students “Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?”

The braver decision for parents may be to give that child a more difficult, but also more valuable, course in life. Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment.