How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

What we can learn from how companies develop strategy is that although it is hard to get it right at first, success doesn’t rely on this. Instead, it hinges on continuing to experiment until you do find an approach that works.

Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success.

Once you understand the concept of emergent and deliberate strategy, you’ll know that if you’ve yet to find something that really works in your career, expecting to have a clear vision of ...

While you are still figuring out your career, you should keep the aperture of your life wide open. Depending on your particular circumstances, you should be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the mot...

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. That thinking can be dangerous. You’re only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, yea...

You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.

The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources.

Everything related to strategy inside a company is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage.

A company can also be at fault when it prioritizes the short term over the long.

Jobs brought Apple back to its roots: to make the best products in the world, change the way people think about using technology in their lives, and provide a fantastic user experience. Anything not aligned with that got scrapped; people who did not agree were yelled at, abased, or fired.

if you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification over endeavors that result in long-term success.

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

“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation process will decide investments for you according to the “default” criteria that essentially are wired into your brain and your heart.

As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process—and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize.

The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.

In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

For those of my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help but believe that their troubles stemmed from incorrectly allocating resources.

They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children.

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 ro...

A strategy—whether in companies or in life—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money.

With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have i...

How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? 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.

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.

Many of us are wired with a high need for achievement, and your career is going to be the most immediate way to pursue that.

But there is much more to life than your career. The person you are at work and the amount of time you spend there will impact the person you are outside of work with your family and close friends.

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.

Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the...

Similarly, the way you balance your plans with unanticipated opportunities, and allocate your resources—your time and energy—does not stop when you walk out the door of your office. You’re making decisions about these every moment of your life.

You have to make sure that you allocate your resources in a way that is consistent with your priorities. You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern. And you have to make sure that you’re thinking about all these in the right time frame—overcome the natural tendency to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term.

Even when you know what your true priorities are, you’ll have to fight to uphold them in your own mind every day.

I’ve had to force myself to stay aligned with what matters most to me by setting hard stops, barriers, and boundaries in my life—such as leaving the office at six every day so that there is daylight time to play catch with my son, or to take my daughter to a ballet lesson—to keep myself true to what I most value.

If I didn’t do this, I know I would be tempted to measure my success that day by having solved a problem rather than getting the time I love with my family.

I have to be clear with myself that the long-term payoff of investing my resources in this sphere of my l...

Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment—but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cul...

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. Even if you’re armed with an abundance of love and good intentions, it’s a complicated world: kids have unprecedented access to ideas from everywhere—their friends, the media, the Internet.

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won’t work.

When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don’t. If anything, it’s the opposite. If you recount our discussion of emergent and deliberate strategy—the balance between your plans and unanticipated opportunities—then you’ll know that getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

What I can promise you is that you won’t get it right if you don’t commit to keep trying.

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.

The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life.

At a basic level, there are two goals investors have when they put money into a company: growth and profitability.

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.

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.

It demands that a new company figures out a viable strategy as fast as and with as little investment as possible—so that the entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy.

any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead.