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February 19 - February 24, 2022
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 rear-view mirror—because data is only available about the past.
You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant. If we can’t see beyond what’s close by, we’re relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us.
You might be tempted to try to make decisions in your life based on what you know has happened in the past or what has happened to other people. You should learn all that you can from the past; from scholars who have studied it, and from people who have gone through problems of the sort that you are likely to face. But this doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into the future. Instead, using robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of success. The theories in this book
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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.
Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions.
True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it.
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.
But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. 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.
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.
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 danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.
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.
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 cultivate with your family and close friends.
We call in to work from remote vacation spots. In fact, we may never take all the vacation days we’re allowed; there’s simply too much to be done. Work becomes how we identify ourselves. We take our smartphones with us everywhere, checking for news constantly—as if not being connected all the time would mean we’re going to miss out on something really important. We expect the people who are closest to us to accept that our schedule is simply too demanding to make much time for them. After all, they want to see us succeed, too, right? We find ourselves forgetting to return e-mails and phone
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you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late. But as you are getting your career off the ground, you will be tempted to do exactly that: assume you can defer investing in your personal relationships. You cannot. The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them.
we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.
Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done.
If what causes us to fall deeply in love is mutually understanding and then doing each other’s job to be done, then I have observed that what cements that commitment is the extent to which I sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.
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?” gives you the ability to think about it in the right unit of analysis.
But you have to go beyond understanding what job your spouse needs you to do. You have to do that job. You’ll have to devote your time and energy to the effort, be willing to suppress your own priorities and desires, and focus on doing what is required to make the other person happy.
Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
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.”
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 the skills they’ll need to succeed. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give them.
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.
A culture can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.
This is what is so powerful about culture. It’s like an autopilot. What is critical to understand is that for it to be an effective force, you have to properly program the autopilot—you have to build the culture that you want in your family.
it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.
In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, the five forces, and other key business theories we teach at Harvard.
