How Will You Measure Your Life?
There are no quick fixes in career and life. However, a few powerful theories can show you HOW to think in order to be happy in your career and your relationships.
Since I first read “How Will You Measure Your Life" by Clayton Christensen a few years ago, I've been going back to this book again and again.
It is not the first and certainly not the last book on finding purpose and meaning in your career, relationships, and life. To me, "How Will You Measure Your Life" stands out for three main reasons.
Firstly, unlike many similar books, it does not come up with quick fixes. It teaches you not WHAT to think, but HOW to think – and proposes a number of simple yet very powerful theories to support your thinking and your decisions.
Secondly, I like how brilliantly this book shows the interconnectedness of our careers, relationships, and ethics. The theories in this book are the powerful lenses through which you can view not only your business and your career but also your personal relationships. Such a holistic view makes perfect sense: we are not different persons and our values do not change when we switch from home to office. Purpose and strategy are as important for a business as they are for a person, and neither purpose nor strategy should be left out to chance.
Finally, this book has such a strong appeal to me because of the personality of its author. Clayton Christensen was widely known for his theory of disruptive innovation. Yet, until I read this book, I had not realized that he was a person of very strong faith and desire to be a doer of good and to help others become better persons. I was pleased to discover similarities between my own thinking and the ideas of this book on raising kids, and having happy personal relationships… I know I will be going back to his ideas again and again.
Key Theories and Takeaways
It's interesting how the book makes a full circle - starting with priorities and purpose and ending with it.
There are no quick fixes in life. Theories offered in this book will help you make good choices appropriate to the circumstances of your life.
The power of a good theory. Without theory, we're at sea without a sextant. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions - not just in business, but in life, too.
Finding happiness in our careers starts with understanding our PRIORITIES. What's most important to you in your career? What makes you tick?
Theory #1. Motivation Theory. Incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. It's possible to love your job and hate it at the same time. Job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not opposites, they are two separate, independent measures. The motivation theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivators. Hygiene factors - things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, etc - if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. It's motivators - challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth, feeling that you are making a meaningful contribution to work - that will cause us to love our jobs. The theory of motivation suggests you 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? Once you get these things right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
Theory #2. Balancing Emerging and Deliberate Strategies. Having a focused plan for your career only makes sense in certain circumstances. If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. But if you haven't reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent, to experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.
Theory #3. Discovery-Driven Planning. It's easy to say be open to opportunities as they emerge. It's much harder to know which strategies you should actually pursue. The key question is to challenge and test your most important assumptions, to ask yourself a question: '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?
Theory #4. Importance of Execution. Your strategy is not what you say it is. 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 consistent with your intentions. A strategy - whether in companies or in life - is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. In the end, the strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented. Watch where your resources flow.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.
Theory #5. Theory of Good and Bad Capital. When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit. The capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. Once the viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek - they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered - success now depends on scaling out this model. Make no mistake about constantly investing in relationships with family and close friends. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you can be tempted to think that you can put those relationships on the back burner. By the time serious problems arise, it often is too late to repair them. The clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don't nurture and develop these relationships, they won't be there to support you during the challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.
Theory #6. Jobs-to-be-done. If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous. The path to finding happiness in the relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. The principle that sacrifice deepens our commitment doesn't just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations. In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.
Theory #7. Theory of Capabilities. You need to understand what capabilities are and which of them will be critical to the future, to know which capabilities to keep in-house and which matter less. The factors that determine what a company can and cannot do - its capabilities - fall into one of the three buckets: resources, processes, and priorities. Resources are the most tangible capability (people, equipment, technology, etc). Processes are the ways that the products are developed and made. Unlike resources, processes are not visible on the balance sheet. If a company has strong processes, it will work regardless of who performs them. The third and most significant capability is priorities. Priorities define how a company makes decisions. You can view your family through the lens of the capabilities. Many families act with their children's best interests at heart when they provide them with abundant resources. But many families make a critical mistake to remove the circumstances in which their children can develop processes: to solve complex problems, to develop a healthy self-esteem that comes not from the abundant resources, but from achieving something hard. Helping our children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. Outsourcing our children's education entirely to other people, we risk that they gain their priorities and values from other people. Never outsource the future.
Theory #8. McCall’s High Flyers Theory. Morgan McCall suggested that people become the best of the best not because they were born with superior skills. Instead, they honed them along the way, by having experiences that taught them how to deal with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations. This model helps identify whether, in an earlier assignment, someone has actually wrestled with a problem similar to the one he will need to wrestle with now. Great leaders are not born ready to go. Their abilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life. Going through the right courses in the schools of experience can help people in call kinds of situations increase the likelihood of success. Does this mean we should never promote an inexperienced manager? It depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience on the job. But in established companies with strongly established processes, it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience. When we transpose it to raising kids, it is important to give them experiences before they need them. It's one of the greatest gifts you can give them.
Theory #9. Culture as an Invisible Hand. One of the most powerful tools to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. 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. A culture is a unique combination of processes and priorities. Every family should choose a culture that is right for them. A culture happens, whether you want it or not. The only question is how hard you are going to influence it. A family culture needs diversity, but for the foundational dimensions of your family culture, there should be uniformity. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, "Well done"? Culture is like an autopilot. But you need to carefully program it. If you do not consciously build and reinforce it from the early stages of your family life, a culture will still form - but in ways, you may not like. It's in everyday interactions that our culture is being set.
Theory #10. The Trap of Marginal Thinking. The marginal thinking principle teaches us that in evaluating the alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues. But it's a dangerous way of thinking. This doctrine biases companies to leverage what made them successful in the past, rather than creating the capabilities they'll need in the future. The right way to look at the new market is not to think "how can we protect our existing business?" but "if we didn't have an existing business, how could we best build a new one?" Failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, and we end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not. How does this apply to personal life and ethics? The marginal cost of doing something unethical "just once" always seems negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher. Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules "just this once". But it's a dangerous path because if you have justified doing it once, there's nothing to stop you from doing it again. So, it's easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold on to them 98 percent of the time. Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.
The Importance of Purpose. If an organization has a clear and compelling purpose, its impact and legacy can be extraordinary. A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is likeness: what the key leaders and employees want the enterprise to have become at the end of the path. The second is commitment to the likeness that they are trying to create. The third part is metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. The type of person you want to become - what the purpose of your life is - is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. If we take the time to figure out our life's purpose, we'll look back on it as the most important thing we will have ever discovered.