How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.

Good theory can help us categorize, explain, and, most important, predict.

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.

This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in “if-then” statements.

Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen.

Each chapter of this book highlights a theory as it might apply to a particular challenge. But just as was true in understanding flight, problems in our lives don’t always map neatly to theories on a one-to-one basis.

I invite you, as you journey through the book, to go back to theories in earlier chapters, just as my students do, and explore the problems through the perspective of multiple theories, too.

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.

There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that’s truly meaningful to them. But for many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.

I want you to be able to experience that feeling—to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing.

a strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there.

We have intentions for our careers. Against those intentions, opportunities and threats emerge that we haven’t anticipated. And how we allocate our resources—our time, talent, and energies—is how we determine the actual strategy of our lives.

priorities. These are, in effect, your core decision-making criteria: what’s most important to you in your career?

The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy.

Following this, I will outline how best to balance our plans to find something that we truly love doing with the opportunities and challenges that we never expected to arise in our lives.

Drawing on our research, I will explain what the best circumstances are to be deliberate, to have that plan; and when it’s best to be emergent—to be open to the unexpected.

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it.

How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources?

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.

All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your s...

When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.

The Importance of Getting Motivation Right

Do Incentives Make the World Go Round?

A Better Theory of Motivation

There are two broad camps on this question.

incentive theory: why don’t managers always behave in a way that is in the best interest of shareholders?

what causes executives to focus on some things and not others is financial incentives.

Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for

One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain.

The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain.

For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. Some work in the most difficult conditions imaginable—disaster recovery zones, countries gripped by famine and flood. They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated.

there is a second school of thought—often called two-factor theory, or motivation theory—that turns the incentive theory on its head. It acknowledges that you can pay people to want what you want—over and over again. But 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.

satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.

This theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors.

elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors.

Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.

You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work.

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. They’re not the same thing at all.

The Balance of Motivators and Hygiene Factors

They’d made choices early on because of the hygiene factors, not true motivators, and they couldn’t find their way out of that trap.

The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.

If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.

Motivation Matters in Places You Might Not Expect

When you really understand what motivates people, it becomes illuminating in all kinds of situations—...

If You Find a Job You Love …

If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators, too.

The second realization I had is that the pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career—yet

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 b...