Measuring our life
Clayton Christensen (Clay), a professor at HBS, famous for his research and its impact on industry, also the author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and many more books.
In his brilliant article “How will you measure your life?”, he raises three important questions.
First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
Third, how to live a life of integrity?
The most powerful motivator for happiness, according to Frederick Herzberg, is not money — it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.
Clay recommends -
Create a strategy for life
A clear purpose in my life has been essential
- Take the time to figure out our life’s purpose. Apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day.
- If we don’t figure it out, we will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
- Clarity about our purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.
- The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving our purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.
One of Clay’s former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was.
Allocate Resources
Our decisions about allocating our personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape our life’s strategy.
We have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for our resources: a rewarding relationship with the spouse, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, and so on. We have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do we devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make our life turn out to be very different from what we intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that we never planned for emerge. But if we misinvest our resources, the outcome can be bad.
People who are driven to excel have an 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.
Create a Culture
Culture dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of a group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems.
Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
Clay introduces a model “Tools for Cooperation” that helps chart an organization’s vision as not just a vector prediction but also a focused journey for its members. The model offers power tools depending on the quadrant as shown in the image below.
Can we use power tools to answer the question — “How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?”
The simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do.
If we want our kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. We have to design them into our family’s culture — and we have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
Avoid the Marginal Costs mistake.
In economics, we are taught to base decisions on Alternative Investmentts on Marginal Costs and Revenues (ignoring sunk costs and fixed costs). The doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future.
This theory addresses the third question — “how to live a life of integrity?”
Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers us in, and we don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
It’s easier to hold to our principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. We’ve got to define for ourself what we stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Remember the importance of Humility.
Humility is defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which we regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility.
We need to take a sense of humility into the world.
If our attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach us, our learning opportunities will be very limited. But if we have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, our learning opportunities will be unlimited. We can be humble only if we feel really good about ourself — and we want to help those around us 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.
My takeaway
Our success isn’t measured by dollars or the level of individual prominence. It is a direct measure of the number of individuals we have helped become better people. That is our North Star.
When we orient our internal compass towards our North Star, our questions will find its answers underpinned by clarity of purpose, efficient allocation of resources, a sustainable culture, firm on foundational values and humility to learn and contribute.
We do this, we would have lived a life.
