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January 8 - January 12, 2022
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
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.
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. There’s an old saying: 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. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “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?
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.
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.
The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships onto the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it
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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.
Never Outsource the Future
Many parents are making the same mistake, flooding their children with resources—knowledge, skills, and experiences. And just as with Dell, each of the decisions to do so seems to make sense. We want our kids to get ahead, and believe
that the opportunities and experiences we have provided for them will help them do exactly that. 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.
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 when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.
You have your children’s best interests at heart when you provide them with resources. It’s what most parents think they’re supposed to do—provide for their child. You can compare with your neighbors and friends how many activities your child is involved in, what instruments he is learning, what sports she is playing. It’s easy to measure and it makes you feel good. But too much of this loving gesture can actually undermine their becoming the adults you want them to be.
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 them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are...
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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. But how do you equip your kids with the right capabilities?
Not only will many parents stay up late to help their child complete the project, some parents might even finish it for him, hoping it helps their child get a good grade. All kinds of good intentions are at work: they may hope that the good grade will help the child maintain a healthy self-esteem. They might even think, “If I step in to finish this for my child, at least he will get a good night’s sleep to help him face tomorrow’s challenges in school. I’ve helped my child through this rough spot. I’m being a supportive parent.” But think about what course you have just given your child with
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The challenges your children face serve an important purpose: they will help them hone and develop
the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives. Coping with a difficult teacher, failing at a sport, learning to navigate the complex social structure of cliques in school—all those things become “courses” in the school of experience. 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.”
The natural tendency of many parents is to focus entirely on building your child’s résumé: good grades, sports successes, and so on. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect the courses your children need to equip them for the future. Once you have that figured out, work backward: find the right experiences to help them build...
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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.
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. —C. S. Lewis
100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time
When a company is faced with making an investment in future innovation, it usually crunches the numbers to decide what to do from the perspective of its existing operations. Based on how those numbers play out, it may decide to forgo the investment if the marginal upside is not worth the marginal cost of undertaking the investment. But there’s a big mistake buried in that thinking.
A man who is dedicated to helping improve the lives of other people A kind, honest, forgiving, and selfless husband, father, and friend A man who just doesn’t just believe in God, but who believes God
