How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Understanding the power and importance of capabilities can make the difference between a g...

But, as parents, we do have the opportunity to help our children get it right.

Priorities determine how a child will make decisions in his life—which things in his mind and life he will put to the top of the list, which he will procrastinate doing, and which he will have no interest in doing at all.

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

Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences?

But the nature of these activities—experiences in which they’re not deeply engaged and that don’t really challenge them to do hard things—denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they’ll need to succeed in the future.

Self-esteem—the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it”—doesn’t come from abundant resources. Rather, self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.

We have outsourced the work from our homes, and we’ve allowed the vacuum to be filled with activities that don’t challenge or engage our kids.

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.

it’s a case of starting early to find simple problems for them to solve on their own, problems that can help them build their processes—and a healthy self-esteem.

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me.

Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement.

But I think my mom didn’t even look at my Levi’s. I think she was looking at me, and probably saw in me the same thing I saw in the patch: “I did that.”

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

Denying children the opportunity to develop their processes is not the only way outsourcing has damaged their capabilities, either. There is something far more important at risk whe...

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.”

Which means that first, when children are ready to learn, we need to be there. And second, we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.

The conundrum was this: given that every last part of it had been replaced, was it still Theseus’s ship? The Athenians still called it Theseus’s Ship … but was it?

I want to turn that into a similar philosophical question for you: if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they?

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.

Rather, the point is that even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all.

Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values.

When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future.

And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all these experiences—outsourcing—you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop ...

Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important oppo...

Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. It will be critical to equipping them for all the challenges that life will throw at them down the line.

The idea that some people have innate talents that just need to be identified has proved to be an unreliable predictor of success in business.

In other words, a typical manager gets it wrong a lot.

It wasn’t because they were born with superior skills. Instead, it was because they had honed them along the way, by having experiences that taught them how to deal with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations.

though the people picked by those companies to run the project were highly experienced, they were not the right people for the job.

going through the right courses in the schools of experience can help people in all kinds of situations increase the likelihood of success.

“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?”

“I wouldn’t ever make the decision based upon how much it paid or the prestige,”

“Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?”

Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends.

As a parent, you can find small opportunities for your child to take important courses early on. 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 it.

Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, t...

Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child st...

When I worked with Boy Scouts over the years, I always wanted the kids to take responsibility for organizing their own camping trips rather than letting the parents step in to do it. When they had to do it themselves, they learned how to plan and organize, how to divide responsibilities, how to communicate among a group, and to appreciate what they’d actually put their own work into.

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. Either he will have to stay up late on his own to pull it off, or he will see what happens when he fails to complete it. And yes, that child might get a bad grade. That might be even more painful for the parent to witness than the child. But that child will likely not feel good about what he allowed to happen, which is the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself.

Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives.

The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life.

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.

We know that people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they’ve taken the wrong “courses.”

One of the most powerful tools to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. We need to understand how it works and be prepared to put in the hard yards to influence how it is shaped.

As parents, we share a common worry: one day, our children are going to be faced with a tough decision … and we are not going to be there to make sure they do the right thing.

Their priorities need to be set correctly so they will know how to evaluate their options and make a good choice. The best tool we have to help our children do this is through the culture we build in our families.

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.

Culture in any organization is formed through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.