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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.
Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.
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
you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life,
incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.
Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.
if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.
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.
Many of my peers had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these.
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.
find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
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.
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.
93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable. In other words, successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong.
shareholders pour lots of capital into these initiatives. But all too often, this abundant capital gives fuel to the entrepreneurs, allowing them to recklessly pursue the wrong strategy aggressively.
Honda succeeded because the company was so financially constrained in its early days, it was forced to be patient for growth while it figured out its profit model.
The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life.
A child who enters school with a strong vocabulary and strong cognitive abilities is likely to do well in school early on and continues to do well in the longer term. It’s mind-boggling to think that such a tiny investment has the potential for such enormous returns.
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.”
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.
Thinking about your relationships from the perspective of the job to be done is the best way to understand what’s important to the people who mean the most to you. It allows you to develop true empathy. Asking yourself “What job does my spouse most need me to do?”
Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
Balance is important, and there are valuable lessons your children will gain from facing the challenges that life will throw at them on their own.
it’s tempting to judge success by a résumé—by looking at the scoreboard of what our children have achieved. But much more important in the long run is what courses our kids have taken as they’ve gone through the various schools of experience. More than any award or trophy, this is the best way to equip them for success as they venture out into the world.
Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
As Henry Ford once put it, “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”
who do I truly want to become?
The more I focused on my problems, the less energy I had to get better.
If you take the time to figure out your purpose in life, I promise that you will look back on it as the most important thing you will have ever learned.
