How Will You Measure Your Life?: Summary Review
This is a summary review of How Will You Measure Your Life? containing key details about the book.
What is How Will You Measure Your Life? About?
"How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen provides a framework for personal and professional fulfillment, exploring the connection between purposeful work, meaningful relationships, and happiness, and offering guidance and reflection questions for readers to evaluate and measure their own lives.
How Will You Measure Your Life is a book of lucid observations and penetrating insights designed to help any reader—student or teacher, mid-career professional or retiree, parent or child—forge their own paths to fulfillment.
Summary Points & Takeaways from How Will You Measure Your Life?
Some key summary points and takeaways from the book include:
* The importance of understanding one's values and setting personal goals that align with them, in order to make choices that will lead to a meaningful life.
* The role of purpose in one's life and how having a clear sense of purpose can help guide decision-making.
* The importance of balance in one's life, between work and personal relationships, and how achieving balance can lead to greater happiness and fulfillment.
* The importance of integrity, and how being true to one's values and principles can lead to a more authentic and fulfilling life.
* The importance of investing in relationships, both personal and professional, and how strong relationships can lead to greater happiness and success in life.
* The importance of lifelong learning and the role of continuous self-improvement in achieving success and fulfillment.
* The book is written in an anecdotal style and draws on the author's personal experiences, as well as the experiences of others, to illustrate the points he makes. It provides a guide to help readers make sense of the complex choices they face in life and to make decisions that will lead to a more fulfilling life.
Who is the author of How Will You Measure Your Life??
Clayton Magleby Christensen was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century.
James Allworth is the Head of Innovation at Cloudflare, and co-host of the Exponent podcast. He is also co-author of the New York Times best-selling book, "How Will You Measure Your Life?".
How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Notes
The Importance of Motivation in Job Satisfaction
Many of us believe that a higher salary or more prestige at work would make us happier. However, studies show that tangible aspects of a job, such as money and prestige, are not the things that will make us happy at work. The key to job satisfaction is motivation, which is derived from work that matches our needs and interests. Psychologist Frederick Herzberg's hygiene-motivation theory proposes that our needs and interests can be divided into two different categories: hygiene factors and motivation factors. Hygiene factors cover issues such as general working conditions, company policies, supervisory practices, and job security. If these issues are not satisfactory or are lacking, it leads to job dissatisfaction. However, job satisfaction is achieved by combining hygiene factors with motivation factors, which concern recognition, responsibility, challenges, and personal growth.
The incentive theory, popularized by economist Michael Jensen and management theorist William Meckling, suggests that the more one is paid, the better they will perform. However, this theory seems too simplistic as studies have shown that the hardest-working people are in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who earn very little. Incentives alone are not enough to keep people motivated at work.
It is essential to find a job that meets our needs and interests, as this is where motivation and job satisfaction come from. A job that is intellectually stimulating but has terrible management will not provide job satisfaction. The confluence of hygiene and motivation factors is crucial to job satisfaction. The next book summary presents two strategies to attain this balance.
Balancing Deliberate and Emergent Strategies in Your Career
One of the key ideas here is that a good career strategy should combine both deliberate and emergent approaches to take advantage of both anticipated and unanticipated opportunities. Deliberate strategies are based on anticipated opportunities that can be recognized and pursued. However, sometimes even the best-laid plans can fail, and that's where emergent strategies come in. These strategies use unanticipated opportunities that arise during the implementation of a deliberate strategy.
To illustrate this, the author uses the example of Japanese car manufacturer Honda, which initially tried to break into the U.S. market with large motorbikes. However, the quality of the bikes was not up to par, and the company struggled. It was only when Honda employees started riding smaller Super Cub motorbikes around Los Angeles that the company stumbled upon an emergent strategy to sell their smaller bikes on a large scale, saving their American venture.
Managing Your Life as a Business
One of the key ideas in this book excerpt is that to live a fulfilling life, we need to manage our personal resources effectively, just as we would in a business. These resources are not just limited to assets, talent, and finances but also include our personal time, energy, skills, and health.
To achieve this, we must broaden our definition of resources and invest in other aspects of our lives that we value, such as family bonds, friendships, and physical health. It's easy to get fixated on career goals and allocate all our resources to them, but we need to prioritize and manage our resources to ensure we invest in other important aspects of our lives as well.
This involves reevaluating the default criteria according to which we typically allocate our time and considering whether there are other things more deserving of our time, such as our family or well-being. High-achieving professionals, in particular, need to avoid prioritizing immediate rewards over long-term gains.
By taking control of our personal resource allocation process, we can avoid the mistake of investing everything into our career and achieve a fulfilling and balanced life. It's important to recognize that although the satisfaction of achieving long-term goals may be gradual and challenging, the reward is lifelong and far more valuable.
The Importance of Family and Friend Relationships for Long-Term Happiness
In the pursuit of career success, we often overlook the importance of investing time and effort into our relationships with family and friends. However, these relationships are crucial for long-term happiness and personal fulfillment. The author highlights the paradoxical nature of relationships, where consistent attention and care are required even when it seems unnecessary. High-achievers tend to prioritize tasks with immediate payoffs, such as work, over family time. But neglecting relationships in the early stages can lead to problems later on, both for the individual and their loved ones. Research shows that the first year of a child's life is the most influential period in their intellectual development, emphasizing the need for parents to invest time and effort early on. Additionally, neglecting relationships can mean losing support from family and friends when it's most needed. The author suggests that we need to make a conscious effort to prioritize relationships and allocate resources to them, just as we would for any other important aspect of our lives.
Understanding and Fulfilling the Needs of Others: The Key to Successful Relationships
The key to a successful relationship, be it personal or professional, is to understand and fulfill the needs of the other person. However, this job is not always easy, and many of us approach relationships with the same mentality as companies approach selling products. We focus so much on our own needs and desires that we lose sight of what the other person truly needs from us.
To succeed in this job, we need to rely on two important tools: intuition and empathy. Intuition allows us to pick up on subtle cues and understand the other person's needs, even if they aren't directly expressed. Empathy allows us to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and understand their feelings and perspectives.
For instance, a husband who intuitively assumes that his wife wants him to tidy up the kitchen after a long day may instead upset her if what she truly needs is someone to listen to her. In this situation, the husband's intuition was off the mark, but he can use this experience to better understand his wife's needs in the future.
Another way to improve relationships is to think of them as a job. Just as a company has a job to fulfill its customers' needs, we also have a job to fulfill the needs of our loved ones. By understanding what job our family, friends, or partners require us to do the most, we can fulfill their needs effectively and build a stronger relationship.
How to Raise Children with Strong Values
As parents, one of our most important responsibilities is educating our children, not just academically, but by providing them with the tools to teach themselves. The book emphasizes the importance of raising children with strong values and fostering their self-esteem. This involves allowing them to face challenges and find solutions on their own, while providing support and guidance when needed.
Children must learn to develop their own values early on, and the best way to achieve this is by encouraging them to solve problems independently. Failure is a natural part of the learning process, and it's important to let children make mistakes and learn from them. The focus should be on providing support and guidance when they falter, rather than trying to prevent failure altogether.
Creating a healthy family culture is another important aspect of parenting. It involves establishing family values and emphasizing their importance in everyday interactions. For example, if kindness is a core value, parents should take every opportunity to praise their children when they demonstrate compassion or empathy towards others. Over time, these values become firmly established, providing a strong foundation that can withstand any challenge.
How compromising your integrity can lead to a slippery slope, and why it's important to avoid it.
Living a life of integrity is not just about making the right choices when faced with moral challenges, it's also about the small decisions we make every day. It's essential to remain aware of the trap of marginal thinking, where we focus on the immediate costs rather than the long-term impact of our choices. Making exceptions to our beliefs or values just once can lead us down a slippery slope where we make increasingly irresponsible decisions that have serious consequences.
The example of Blockbuster and Netflix illustrates how marginal thinking can be disastrous for businesses. By dismissing the innovative online rental company, Blockbuster missed an opportunity to adapt and eventually declared bankruptcy. When it comes to personal integrity, making decisions that go against our beliefs, even just once, can be harmful. The story of Nick Leeson and Barings shows how one "just this once" decision can snowball into more marginal thinking and eventually result in a catastrophic loss.
Living with integrity requires constant self-awareness and making choices that align with our values and beliefs, even when it's difficult or inconvenient. It's important to avoid making exceptions or justifying behavior that goes against our moral code, as it can lead us down a slippery slope where we compromise our integrity and face serious consequences. Instead, we should focus on making choices that reflect who we are and what we stand for, even when it's not the easiest or most convenient option. This way, we can ensure that we live a life that we can be proud of and that aligns with our values and beliefs.
Book Details
- Print length: 240 pages
- Genre: Nonfiction, Business, Self Help
How Will You Measure Your Life? Chapters
Chapter 1 :Just because you have feathers
Chapter 2:FInding happiness in your career
Chapter 3:What makes us tick
Chapter 4:The balance of calculation and serendipity
Chapter 5:Your strategy is not what you say it is
Chapter 6:Finding happiness in your relationships
Chapter 7:The ticking clock
Chapter 8:What job did you hire that milkshake for?
Chapter 9:Sailing your kids on Theseus's ship
Chapter 10:The schools of experience
Chapter 11:The invisible hand inside your family
Chapter 12:Staying out of jail
Chapter 13:Just this once.
What is a good quote from How Will You Measure Your Life?
Top Quote: “It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.” (Meaning) - How Will You Measure Your Life? Quotes, Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon
* The editor of this summary review made every effort to maintain information accuracy, including any published quotes, chapters, or takeaways. If you're interested in furthering your personal development, I invite you to check out my list of favorite personal development books page. On this page, you'll find a curated list of books that have personally impacted my life, each with a summary and key lessons.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
