How to measure your life
by Clayton M. Christensen summary

From the world’s leading thinker on innovation, Harvard professor, and New York Times bestselling author, Clayton Christensen, comes an unconventional book of inspiration and wisdom for achieving a fulfilling life. He observed that many of his classmates, despite many accomplishments, were clearly unhappy with their lives. Divorce and the deterioration of many personal relationships were symptoms of something that had seriously gone awry with their lives.

In a nutshell, Mr. Christensen covers three broad areas:
A meaningful and rewarding career.
Meaningful and rewarding personal relationships.
Personal integrity, and remaining in alignment with one's own personal code of ethics.

Christensen’s wants to help you wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. How Will You Measure Your Life, will help you build a strategy to do exactly that.

On career happiness, Christensen warns that compromising on the wrong career path (for fame, money, power) is a cancer that will metastasize over time. What matters most is making sure our jobs are aligned with what really makes us happy. Motivation is much less about external prodding or incentives and much more about what’s inside of you and whether the work is challenging, provides for personal growth, responsibility, recognition, and sense that you are making a meaningful contribution. Money is not the root cause of unhappiness but becomes a problem when it supersedes everything else.

On personal relationships, Christensen notes from his observations and personal experience that the relationships you have with your spouse and your kids are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. 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 is often too late to repair them.

He warns that a common mistake made by both men and women is to believe we can invest in life sequentially. I have seen this many times…career is first, marriage is second, and children are relegated to third. The problem is made worse today with so many two income families. While each relationship needs to be routinely nourished and refreshed, we end up putting relationships on the back-burner because we are busy and preoccupied with less important things of life.

To succeed with relationships, Christensen asks us to think about the job we were “hired” to do – as a spouse, as a parent, as a friend. “The path to happiness (in relationships) is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone who’s happiness is worth devoting yourself to…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. Sacrifice deepens our commitment. It applies to all of our relationships.”

Christensen notes that our role as parents is to prepare our children for the future. The tragedy of today’s culture is that we are outsourcing parenting to other relatives, nannies, schools, and extracurricular activities. We have lost sight of the importance of our time - the greatest gift we can give another person. Investing our time in another is a sign of respect and love. It provides a clear signal to others as to what is most important in your life. Creating a healthy family culture is hard work and requires an investment of self and time.

On staying out of jail, Christensen warns against marginal thinking. It applies to choosing right and wrong. We are presented with moral challenges throughout life. When we think about doing something “just this one time” because the marginal cost appears to be negligible, we get trapped in. We don’t see where that path will ultimately take us nor do we appreciate the full cost of the choice. It could be one of many things – misrepresenting expenses or revenues, stuffing a distribution channel, insider trading, a small bribe to gain business, the use of drugs. The landscape is littered with people who never gave a thought to crossing the line “just this once,” thinking they would never get caught.

Doing the right thing 100% of the time is easier than 98% of the time. If we break our own rules just once, we can justify the small choices again. Using marginal cost thinking to justify all the small decisions lead up to a big one. Then, the big one does not seem enormous anymore; it is just another incremental step. The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.”

The danger for high-achieving people is that they will unconsciously allocate the resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. They become accustomed to allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most. They are investing in lives of hallow unhappiness.

To avoid the pitfalls of creating hollow unhappiness, it is imperative that we define our purpose. The three parts of purpose are: establishing a direction (career, relationships, and staying out of jail) with milestones to mark our progress; making a deep, unwavering commitment to achieving the milestones; and using metrics to mark progress.

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