I don’t really remember how I found the book “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, not sure if I was navigating on Goodreads or VPL website, but I remember that it was not a recommendation. But as soon as I saw that Clayton M. Christensen was one of the authors I got interested in it as I read his other great book The Innovator’s Dilemma.
This book also came at a moment that I am reflecting more about the goals of life, what we want our legacy to be, and what really matters to us. It provided some theories and new ways of thinking while also consolidating some learnings.
Let’s now see more about the book How Will You Measure Your Life?
This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.
Learnings from How Will You Measure Your Life?
The book in a way was born by the realization that the authors know people who despite having very good careers and accomplished a lot professionally were clearly unhappy, they didn’t really enjoy what were doing. Also, they notice that most of their successful friends have had many divorces and unhappy relationships with spouses, children, and friends.
While there are no easy answers to life’s challenges, the book proposes to help you by providing tools, what they call theories, that will help you make good choices according to the circumstances and specifics of your life.
The book is full of good examples and stories of each of these theories, they do a great job of connecting the stories with the message that they want you to get from the theory.
They use these stories to teach you how to think, so you can make the decision, and not have the answer from them, as they mentioned “But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.” when talking about a time they were helping Andrew Grove when he was CEO of Intel.
While experiences and information can be good teachers, with the theories of the book, you can learn to be a good spouse before going through multiple marriages, and master parenthood before your last child has grown. “Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen”
The book is divided into three parts, Finding Happiness in Your Career, Finding Happiness in Your Relationships, and Staying Out of Jail. I will also subdivide using this structure for better explanation.
The books heavily rely on business examples, even in the relationship parts. It brings in a way the business philosophy to our personal lives.
Finding Happiness in Your Career
For us to be able to find happiness in our careers, we need to understand what makes us tick, it is a critical step on the path to fulfillment. The starting point for our journey is a discussion of priorities.
Money is not all
Incentives (like money) do not completely make the word go around, because when people love what they do, they usually don’t need incentives as they are always striving to do their best.
So you need a balance between hygiene factors (things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices) and motivators (things like challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth).
You can only find happiness in your career if you have both hygiene factors and motivators. Only hygiene factors (high pay for example) will not make you happy in the long term.
Sometimes the more important is the journey, the building of it, and how we feel about our own contribution, what we find satisfying, than the destination (or result) itself.
Having a strategy is essential
Also, it is important to have a strategy to pursue your goals, the best “strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.”
But having a strategy is not enough, you will have to dedicate resources to it, like your time, your energy, and your money. The real strategy is not the one that you plan, is the one that you allocate the resources towards. We usually write a beautiful plan or strategy but do not allocate resources according to it. That is never going to work. “In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road.”
“A strategy - whether in companies or in life - is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.”
You are only one
Another important learning is that personal life affects work and work affects personal life. Coworkers are people. The way their work goes affects their families and the way their families go affects their work. Doing great things at work improves the personal life, as doing great things in the personal life also affects work.
Finding Happiness in Your Relationships
We have limited time and energy, and we have to make sure we allocate our time and energy according to our priorities. We also have to make sure our measures of success are aligned with what are our most important concerns. Thinking in the long term and avoiding the trap to focus on short-term gratifications. As the job is demanding and we get quicker feedback, we tend to spend most of our energy and time on the job. And doing that, our lives and relationships become shallow and erode with time.
The job to be done
One nice concept described in the book of “te job to be done.” It is basically “the insight behind this way of thinking is that what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.”
“Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase.”
Just like a product or service is “hired” to fix a need or problem, in our personal life our partner also “hired” us for some job to be done. If we are able to find out what is this job to be done, and how can we do what our spouse “needs to be done” our relationship will improve. But understanding that is not an easy thing to do, “understanding the job requires the critical ingredients of intuition and empathy”. One of the hardest things is that after a while we start assuming what our spouse wants without really thinking if they want that. “We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants.”
“This may be the single hardest thing to get right in a marriage. Even with good intentions and deep love, we can fundamentally misunderstand each other. We get caught up in the day-to-day chores of our lives. Our communication ends up focusing only on who is doing what. We assume things.”
But understanding is not enough, we have to do the job. “You’ll have to devote your time and energy to the effort, be willing to suppress your own priorities and desires, and focus on doing what is required to make the other person happy”
How to raise good children
The book in great lengths about children, and despite me, not having any, I think the insights are still important.
About children, the book shows that even the interactions when the children are really young matter for their development, so for parents, if they are not focusing on the children from start, they will lose and the children will also. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care.
One of the insights is that most parents today when raising their children looks to provide a great myriad of experiences for the children, like having them do piano, dancing, soccer, etc. While all these experiences are good, sometimes what they lack is the opportunity to have challenges that they can overcome and be ready for life.
No parent wants to see the child suffering, but “By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.”
As the authors mentioned, “I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me - but rather from what they didn’t do for me”. Allowing the children to go through the challenges by themselves will help them hone and develop the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives.
“Encourage them to stretch - to aim for lofty goals. If they don’t succeed, make sure you’re there to help them learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough”
The importance of an explicit family culture
One of the best insights that I got from it is that we should be conscious and deliberately think about things in our relationships. Like every company has its culture (written or not), all families have a culture, it will happen independently. So it is better if we are deliberate about it and take control (or at least try to guide it) instead of leaving it to happen.
The right culture will help your children make the best decisions when they are not around. “This is what is so powerful about culture. It’s like an auto-pilot.”
So you have to be explicit about your family culture, a culture with a clear set of priorities for everyone to follow. Be clear about what you expect is good behavior and what is not. “Allowing your children to get away with lazy or disrespectful behavior a few times will begin the process of making it your family’s culture. So will telling them that you’re proud of them when they work hard to solve a problem.”
“Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.”
Dedicate resources
We tend to dedicate most of our energy and time to work and we get home we have spent most of our energy sometimes we just want to rest and do nothing, but if you don’t dedicate the energy and resources to your family and relationships, they will fade away. As the authors say, “I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care”
Staying Out of Jail
The third and last section of the book is short and talks about living a life of integrity. The basic idea is that no one plans to go down the wrong path, but it happens, slowly step-by-step. One relatively small error that we don’t admit and cover-up, and then the spiral of self-delusion explained very well in the book Mistakes Were Made (but not by Me).
So, every time that you are presented with a small opportunity or make a small mistake, own it and don’t try to cover it. “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.".Doing things 100% of the time is easier than 98% of the time
Epilogue
The book ends by reinforcing that we have to have a purpose in life. Clay explains what is his purpose and how it is based on the idea that a purpose has three parts: likeness, commitment, and metrics.
The likeness is what he wants the purpose to be, the pencil drawing that a painter does before applying the oil. A purpose also has to be useful, we need to commit the resources and energy to it. And finally, we need a way to measure if you are in the right way.
“Understanding the three parts composing the purpose of my life - a likeness, a commitment, and a metric- is the most reliable way I know of to define for yourself what your purpose is, and to live it in your life every day.”
Favorite quotes
These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.
“The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.”
“In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work - and far too little on the person they want to be at home.”
”.. 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’s not necessary."
“People in their later years of life so often lament that they didn’t keep in better touch with friends and relatives who once mattered profoundly to them. Life just seemed to get in the way.”
“the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.”
Other resources
This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.
Hidden Brain Podcast Episode Happiness 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpos: Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity.
These are my learnings from the book “How will you measure your life?”, written by psychologists Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth & Karen Dillon. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.
Happy reading!
Liked this post? Check out other posts part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view