1. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen – Harvard Business Review
“In 2010, the Harvard Business School graduating class asked Clay Christensen to address them on how they could apply his business ideas–but not to their careers but to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Clayton Christensen was one of their Harvard Business School professors, and is a Harvard Business School graduate himself as well as a Rhodes scholar.
The goal of his lecture was to persuade each students to spend serious time coming up with satisfying answers to these three questions:
- How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
- How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
- How can I live a life of integrity (and be sure I’ll stay out of jail?)
Please do read the article–and send it to any young adult you think might benefit from it. I’ve included my favourite snippets below. I found myself wanting to include just about everything–you know it’s a good read when that happens!
“I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children.
The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent.
My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.”
“Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy.
The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.”
“Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy. I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?”
“When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted.
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.”
“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
“I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others.”
“Once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.”
“Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.”
“Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”
“This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
How to apply Clayton Christensen’s ideas:
Here’s what I’ve come up with for me. You need to come up with your own list!
- I need to experiment with his idea of teaching people how to think. He recommends describing how an idea applies in one setting and then hope the other person will effortlessly see how the same idea will work for them. This approach is better simply telling someone, “This is what you need to do.”
- Check after interacting with others: Did I leave that person feeling unappreciated, demeaned and frustrated or did I add value to their self-esteem?
- What metric do I want my life to be judged by? I need to keep reminding myself of my purpose first every morning. I know it is–it just keep turning fuzzy on me when things go wrong or get hard.
- Be on guard against slipping into”just this time” thinking .
- I need to work on my humility–to better develop a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody! Humility isn’t my strong suit!
