How will you measure your life? A Book Excerpt and ode to a great person

 

How will you measure your life by Clayton M. Christensen

Book Excerpt

Clayton, who recently passed away in early 2020 was a leading innovations expert and professor at Harvard Business School and a fairly successful entrepreneur. However the most endearing aspect of Clayton is that he is a long term devoted member of a community for which I have deep respect due to the amazingly committed and awesome people it has brought forth. In order to aid in answering the question of “How to measure one’s life”, 3 basic questions are being asked by Clayton and his co-authors.

1.      How to be successful and happy in your career?

2.      How can my relationships with my spouse, children, and extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?

3.      How to live a life of integrity and stay out of jail?

To answer 1, Clayton calls out the theory of motivation by Fredrick Herzberg, who distinguishes hygiene factors at work such as status, compensation, job security, company politics, working conditions etc., and motivating factors such as meaningful work, development opportunity, learning new things, recognition and achievement, additional responsibilities.  In the quest for a combination of motivating and hygiene factors to determine the right career, it is advised to remain flexible about any emerging opportunities or strategy and not stick to the first career strategy one embarks on. 93% of companies fail in their original strategy and succeed in what they attempt next if they still have resources and capital left to address the new and emergent strategy. Likewise it is important to stay open to new developments in our careers as well when the combination of motivating and hygiene factors meet up. The real strategy for a company or your own life is NOT what one says it is but where one employs all their resources and energies into.

To answer 2, we need to be able to answer the question- what job does my spouse or children most needs me to do? Once we realize the answer to that question, we need to be able to invest all our energies in doing that even if that is not what we like to do or is our priority. One may think that by sacrificing this way, one will be unhappy but contrary to that, this is the shortest way to happiness. Begin with the question “What job needs to get done for the other person”. This is very similar to business question of “what is the problem customer wants solved?” As parents, all of us want to provide our children infinite opportunities and resources at their beck and call. Instead what is being signified is to provide capabilities. Capability is defined as the sum total of resources, processes and priorities. Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, one is not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. They will learn when they are ready to learn and when the time is right, you need to be there to shape their priorities and their lives.  What “schools of experience” do our children go through as enabling processes to develop the capability and in the area of their priority to develop? Coping with a difficult individual in their lives, failing in sports, learning to navigate complex cliques at school, dealing with bullying and doing the right thing-all become “courses” in the school of experience. Usually people who don’t succeed in particular roles in their career or life are due to not been prepared with previous “courses” taken to prepare them for that particular challenge. How do we prepare children to go out in the world and live their lives best way possible? The best way is to instill the family values growing up and being consistent with it throughout that it becomes second nature for them.

To answer 3, we need to avoid the trap of marginal thinking? Why would doing this just once is a bad idea? As in business decisions made on marginal thinking, the only way to avoid consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in life is to never start making them in the first place.

Life will be well lived when lived with a purpose. What are the 3 tenets of purpose? Likeness- the person one wants to become, Commitment (to that likeness) and finding the right metric to measure that likeness. Being clear on the measurement is also important to evaluating how successful one has been in living their purpose.  This is a great book for anyone who has a passion for something and also searching for meaning in their lives. Others who have arrived can also validate what they know with the easy to understand principles articulated in this easy read. It took me 3 years to finally get to finish my first read of this book. Something tells me I might get back to another read a few years later.