How Will You Measure Your Life? Hardcover – May 15, 2012

Harvard professor and best-selling author (“The Innovators Dilemma,” “The Innovators Prescription,” “Disrupting Class,” and more), Clayton Christensen 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.

With this as a backdrop, Christensen began to challenge his graduating students with three simple questions to examine, measure, and improve their lives after Harvard:
1. How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career?
2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse, my children and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
3. How can I be sure that I live a life of integrity – and stay out of jail? (Enron’s Jeff Skilling was in Christensen’s class at Harvard.)

“How Will You Measure Your Life?” emerged from this encounter with students. In it, Christensen asks the critical questions and provides a guide about how to think about life, one based on a deep understanding of human endeavor – what causes what to happen, and why. This he believes will help us with decisions we make every day in our lives – decisions that will help us avoid bad outcomes, unhappiness, and regret.

Christensen uses business case studies throughout the book. He draws from these to provide a philosophy for life that offers real success.

The starting point is a discussion of priorities - finding happiness in your career, finding happiness in your relationships and staying out of jail - so we can avoid the trap of giving-in to the inner voice that screams the loudest. 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. (One friend of mine commented that when he left Wall Street as a well-known healthcare stock analyst to an executive role in a major healthcare firm that he was surprised to find that people really at this firm were not motivated by income but rather, were focused on reducing mortality and improving lives. The only thing he said that mattered on Wall Street was how much money you made!)

“Before you take that job:
• Carefully list the things that others are going to need to do or deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do for yourself.
• What assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating?
• Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators?
• Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing?
• Think about the most important assumptions that have to prove true? How can you swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. What evidence do you have?”

On personal relationships, Christensen notes from his observations and personal experience that the relationships you have with family and close friends 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. The paradox is that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it is not necessary.”

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. We end up neglecting the people we care most about in the world. Without focus, we lose out on those rich and deep personal relationships that are the essence 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. Marriages are the merging of two cultures. Each family should choose a culture that’s right for them. This entails choosing activities to pursue, and outcomes to achieve. With time, family members will be on auto-pilot thinking “this is how we do it.” Culture development cannot be outsourced. It is doing things together – working in the yard, fixing the house, camping, homework, family sporting events, table games, cooking, etc. – to show our children how to love work, how to solve problems, how to prioritize and what really matters. Culture happens whether you want it to or not. The only question is how much you will influence it.

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 suckered 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. The world will not deliver a cogent and rewarding purpose to you.

What is the type of person you want to become?
What is the purpose of your life? Is that important to you?
Is it something you want to leave to chance?

"How Will You Measure Your Life?"

If you feel you've lost your way

How will you measure your life? How to reach fulfillment.

While there is no one shoe fits all answer for everyone, there are various insights within these pages that a multitude can benefit from. Though humans are unique in their own special way, we share similar experiences. The author has used his life and the lives of others as a base point, gathering lessons in the hope that they will benefit you on your life's journey: providing you with the knowledge to live and have the best possible life ever.
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The book starts off with helping readers to understand what's important in our lives and how we should prioritize our actions, thoughts and resources to that purpose rather than aimlessly and passively floating along. How can we Achieve our goals or contribute to our happiness without implementing ourselves to that cause? We must act on what makes us tick, no ones going to give it to us.
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It continues to speak on fulfillment in careers, families, and happiness in relationships.

Professor Clayton Christensen is my favorite business writer. He take business and high sounding economic terms and dissect them to the practical understanding of the layman. Following in the paths of his other best selling and highly elucidating books on innovation and other subjects, this book is to say the least, not disappointing at all.

Even though life is not all about business, he (and the co-authors) has severally used simplified and yet highly practical language to propose what should and ought to be the most important measure and approaches to life in general. A highly enlightening book, readers will not be disappointed.

Among other topics, the authors explained how readers can use what they called the deliberate (or planned) and emergent strategy to discover what their life's purpose, goal, pursuits and what might eventually work for them in life. The likelihood of the success of any of these strategies been tested along the way with the statement, “What has to prove true for this to work? ”

Going further, according to them, people in all cadres of life can use the theory of full costs and marginal costs in taking decisions that have overreaching long or short term repercussions in business and in situations that call for moral choices. They explained that, "The marginal cost of doing something “just this once” always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher. Yet unconsciously, we will naturally employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives. 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 okay.” And the voice in our head seems to be right; the price of doing something wrong “just this once” usually appears alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t see where that path is ultimately headed or the full cost that the choice entails."
This book did not set out to just simply teach us morals. But, in our world and times where people see morals as relative, I find the authors' emphasis in this area towards the end of the book a highly reassuring guide.

Among other things, my take home from this book is:
Never lower your morals in other to please others or meet their expectations. Do not debase yourself or go contrary to what you know to be your true inner convictions and what is the right thing to do. Why? This is because, according to the authors, it is easier to stay true to your convictions 100% of the time than it is to stay true to them 98% of the time. Why is this so? This is because, you never can tell where or how far you will go down the drain after that first, initial, "Just this one time only" act of compromise.
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All quotations & brief excerpts are from: Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon; How Will You Measure Your Life?
©Harper Business, 2012

I loved reading this book so much, bought it for my coworker. Definitely a book you will need to reference for career, marriage, relationships, and life in general to to teach you theories so you know how to measure your happiness so you don’t make mistakes & settle in life.
I love the personal stories the author shared with his own life and what he learned to help many of us so we can prove these theories before accepting a new job offer or settling for the wrong relationship. Wish this professor taught this in my school years ago, but at least I learned now.