100 Top Quotes From How Will I Measure My Life
How Will I Measure My Life by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon is a thought-provoking book that blends business insights with profound life lessons. Drawing from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen's famous speech, the authors explore the concept of finding meaning and purpose in life through deliberate choices and actions. The book challenges readers to reflect on their long-term goals and priorities, encouraging them to approach life with the same rigor and strategy they apply in business endeavors.
Christensen shares personal anecdotes and poignant stories of successful individuals who veered off course due to misguided priorities, highlighting the importance of aligning actions with core values. He introduces the idea of "marginal thinking" to illustrate the cumulative impact of small daily decisions on shaping our lives. This powerful book invites readers to examine their beliefs, relationships, and contributions to society, offering valuable insights to those seeking fulfillment and genuine happiness. By integrating management theories with life wisdom, "How Will I Measure My Life" provides a unique and transformative perspective on living a purposeful and meaningful life. (How Will I Measure My Life Summary).
How Will I Measure My Life Quotes
"The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs”
"Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.”
"It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.” (Meaning)
"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.”
"If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”
"In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”
"In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.”
"I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.”
"The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”
"Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.”
"In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.”
"The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”
"Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.”
"Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain”
"Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.”
"In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.”
"Successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong. The”
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
"This may sound counterintuitive, but I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.”
"You perfect results. What I can promise you is that you won’t get it right if you don’t commit to keep trying.”
"In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
"Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.”
"As Henry Ford once put it, “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”
"People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.”
"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.”
"Getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.”
"But if anyone believes that he is working harder but is being paid less than another person, it would be like transplanting cancer into this company.”
"Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
"Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time. When”
"The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But 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 often is too late to repair them. This means, almost paradoxically, 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’s not necessary.”
"People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do. This,”
"On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.”
"In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.”
"The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention."
"On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.”
"One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain.”
"what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy.”
"What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?”
"These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.”
"We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.”
"The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.”
"There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life.”
"What has to prove true for this to work?”
"It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.”
"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.”
"Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?”
"Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. Those”
"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
"You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate 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.”
"Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future.”
"The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.”
"I’m not advocating throwing kids straight into the deep end to see whether they can swim. Instead, it’s a case of starting early to find simple problems for them to solve on their own, problems that can help them build their processes—and a healthy self-esteem. As I look back on my own life, 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.”
"Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve.”
"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. —C. S. Lewis”
"As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”
"People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this…is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror-because data is only available about the past.”
"In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.”
"It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.”
"100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to just use the marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.”
"Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.”
"To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”
"We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.”
"The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”
"One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced.”
"A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.”
"Self-esteem—the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it”—doesn’t come from abundant resources.”
"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 people ask me something, I now rarely answer directly.”
"Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It”
"People presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.”
"If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.”
"Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you.”
"Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself.”
"What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control? Equally important, ask 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? What evidence do you have?”
"In the strategy process, resource allocation is where the rubber meets the road. The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources. Everything related to strategy inside a company is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage. A company’s vision, plans, and opportunities—and all of its threats and problems—all want priority, vying against one another to become the actual strategy the company implements”
"Children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”
"Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives.”
"Business. One particularly common one is RONA, or Return on Net Assets. In manufacturing businesses, this is calculated by dividing a company’s income by its net assets. Hence, a company can be judged as being more profitable either by adding income to the numerator, or by reducing the assets in the denominator. Driving the numerator up is harder, because it entails selling more products. Driving the denominator down is often easier—because you can just opt to outsource.”
"Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart.”
"Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse.”
"But just as was true in understanding flight, problems in our lives don’t always map neatly to theories on a one-to-one basis.”
"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.”
"Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience”
"If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”
"Denying children the opportunity to develop their processes is not the only way outsourcing has damaged their capabilities, either. There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.”
"even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all.”
"The second source of options is unanticipated—usually a cocktail of problems and opportunities that emerges while you are trying to implement the deliberate plan or strategy that you have decided upon. At Honda, what was unanticipated were the problems with the big bikes, the costs associated with fixing them, and the opportunity to sell the little Super Cub motorbikes.”
"anticipated opportunities—the opportunities that you can see and choose to pursue. In Honda’s case, it was the big-bike market in the United States. When you put in place a plan focused on these anticipated opportunities, you are pursuing a deliberate strategy.”
"ask 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? What evidence do you have? Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Make sure you are being realistic about the path ahead of you.”
"Excuse me. Can you help me understand what job you are trying to do with that milkshake?” When they’d struggle to answer this question, we’d help them by asking, “Well, think about the last time you were in this same situation, needing to get the same job done—but you didn’t come here to hire that milkshake. What did you hire?” The answers were enlightening:”
"Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all these experiences—outsourcing—you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives.”
"There is no one right answer for all circumstances. You have to start by understanding the job the customer is trying to have done.”
"Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.”
"You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant.”
"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. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn’t intuitively map in customers’ minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.”
"Finding Happiness in Your Career The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs”
"your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world.”
"We learned that just as the fast-food restaurant had been improving the milkshake on dimensions of improvement irrelevant to the jobs that customers were trying to do, our schools were improving themselves on dimensions of improvement irrelevant to the job that students are trying to do. There is no way that we can motivate children to work harder in class by convincing them that they should do this. Rather, we need to offer children experiences in school that help them do these jobs—to feel successful and do it with friends.”
"If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous.”
"The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.”
"If we can’t see beyond what’s close by, we’re relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.”
"Yes, we can do all kinds of things for our spouse, but if we are not focused on the jobs she most needs doing, we will reap frustration and confusion in our search for happiness in that relationship.”
"One of the most important jobs you’ll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse. Getting this right, I believe, is critical to sustaining a happy marriage.”
― Quotes from the book How Will I Measure My Life by Clayton M. Christensen
How Will I Measure My Life Author
Clayton M. Christensen was a renowned business theorist, Harvard Business School professor, and author who made a lasting impact on the world of innovation and disruptive technologies. His seminal work, "The Innovator's Dilemma," introduced the concept of disruptive innovation, revealing how successful companies could be blindsided by smaller, more agile competitors. Christensen's research showed that established companies often fail to innovate successfully because they focus on sustaining existing products and neglect emerging market opportunities. He emphasized the need for organizations to be adaptable and willing to disrupt their own business models to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. Through his teachings and writings, including "The Innovator's Solution" and "How Will You Measure Your Life?," Christensen inspired entrepreneurs and leaders to approach innovation strategically and instigated a paradigm shift in how businesses perceive and respond to disruptive forces. His groundbreaking ideas have left an indelible mark on the business world, fostering a culture of continuous innovation and adaptability.
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.
