What You Will Learn from How Will You Measure Your Life?

How Will You Measure Your Life is full of inspiration and wisdom that will help students, mid-career professionals, and parents alike forge their own paths to fulfilment.

In How Will You Measure Your Life, the world’s leading thinker on innovation and New York Times bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton M. Christensen suggests a series of questions: How can I be sure that I’ll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity and staying out of jail?

Career

When you were ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut, archaeologist, firefighter, baseball player—your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy.

There are a determined few who never lose the aspiration to do something that’s truly meaningful for them. But for many of us, we allow our dreams to fade as the years go by. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and settle for them.

The balance of motivators and hygiene factors

There are elements of work that may cause dissatisfaction if you don’t do it right. These are called the hygiene factors, which include: status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies and supervisory practices. Improving your job’s hygiene factors alone won’t make you love it, but it’s still important to address them. For instance, it’s important to build a safe and comfortable working environment, develop healthy relationships with coworkers or earn enough to look after your family. Without these elements, you’ll always experience dissatisfaction with your work.

What about the things that will make us love our jobs? These are motivators, which include: challenging work, recognition, responsibility and personal growth. These factors invoke a feeling that you’re making a meaningful contribution at work. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation and much more about what’s inside of you and your work.

Balancing emergent and deliberate

If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear and you know from your present experience that they are worth striving for. Rather than worrying about adjusting to unexpected opportunities, your frame of mind should focus on achieving the goals you’ve deliberately set.

If you haven’t found a career that satisfies both motivators and hygiene factors, you need to be emergent. As you go through your career you will begin to find the areas of work you love and thrive in. When you find out what works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

Relationship / Family

In our lives, we have the following resources:

• Personal time
• Energy
• Talent
• Wealth

and we are using them to grow several ‘businesses’ in our personal life, which include:

• Having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other
• Raising great children
• Succeeding in our careers
• Contributing to the community
• Etc.

Unfortunately, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation processes will decide your investments according to the default criteria that is wired into you.

The danger of high achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. In many cases, it is often in their careers, as it’s the domain that provides the most concrete evidence for progression.

However, the relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. Even when it seems like your home life is going well, it doesn’t mean you can put off your investments in these relationships. Because by the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it’s often too late to repair them. The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them.

Parenting

Wishing for a particular family structure and actually having it are two very different things. 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. We need to understand how it works and be prepared to put in the work to influence how it can be shaped.

When the chariot goes over the hill

Most parents share a common worry. One day their children are going to face a tough situation, and they aren’t going to be there to help. All they can do is hope that somehow they’ve raised their children well enough that they come to the right conclusion by themselves.

How do we make sure that happens? It’s not as simple as setting family rules and hoping for the best. Something fundamental has to occur and it has to happen years before the moment arises. The best tool to help your children do this is through the culture we build in our families. When a difficult situation arises, their priorities need to be set correctly so they will know how to evaluate their opinions and make a good choice.

What you child can and can’t do

We can’t go back to develop the capabilities we wish we had. But parents have the opportunity to help their children get it right.

Resources, processes and priorities model of capabilities can help parents gauge what their children will need to overcome challenges and problems that may arise in the future.

The first of the factors that determine what a child can and can’t do is their resources. These include the financial and material resources they’ve earned; their time and energy; their knowledge, talent and experiences.

The second group of factors that determine a child’s capabilities are processes. Processes are what a child does with their resources. Processes comprise the way they think, ask questions and solve problems. These are relatively intangible, but they’re a large part of what makes a child unique.

The third is priorities. They’re not dissimilar to what we have in our own lives. School, sports, family, work and faith. Priorities determine how a child will make decisions in their life.

Development of children

Helping their children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. It will be critical to equip them for all the challenges that life will throw at them down the line. But how do you equip children with the right capabilities?

Many parents at dinner tables around the world may find themselves in the following situation: A child announces they have a big report or project due the next day and they haven’t started it. Panic ensues.

What would a parent do? Not only will many parents stay up late to help their child complete the project, but some parents might even finish it for them. All kinds of good intentions are at work. But think about the course they’ve just given their child with the decision to bail them out. You’ve taken them through the experience of learning how to take shortcuts. They may think: ‘My parents will be there to solve hard problems for me. I won’t have to figure it out on my own. Good grades are what matters, much more than doing the work.’

The braver decision for parents is to give that child a more difficult but also more valuable course in life. Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment. Either they’ll have to stay up late on their own to pull it off or they’ll see what happens when they fail to complete it. That child will likely not feel good, but it’s the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself.

Parents should consciously think about what abilities they want their child to develop, and consider the experiences that will get them there. It may not be easy, but it’ll be worthwhile.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

In 2010 Christensen gave a powerful speech to the Harvard Business School’s graduating class. Drawing upon his business research, he offered a series of guidelines for finding meaning and happiness in life. The speech was memorable because it was revealing and emerged around a time of intense personal reflection. Christensen had just overcome cancer and as he was struggling with the disease, the question ‘How do you measure your life?’ became more urgent and poignant.

As illustrated through the pointers above, How Will You Measure Your Life provides incredible insights into this question using lessons from some of the world’s greatest businesses.