How Will You Measure Your Life?

About the Author

Clayton M. Christensen was a renowned American academic, business consultant, and religious leader. He was best known for his theory of "disruptive innovation," which has been widely influential in business strategy and management. Christensen was a professor at Harvard Business School and authored several best-selling books, including "The Innovator's Dilemma." His work has had a significant impact on both academia and industry, guiding companies on how to achieve sustainable growth through innovation. Christensen's insights into personal and professional success are encapsulated in his book "How Will You Measure Your Life?" which he co-authored with James Allworth and Karen Dillon.

Main Idea

"How Will You Measure Your Life?" explores the fundamental questions of how to achieve a fulfilling and successful life. Christensen argues that true success is not just about professional accomplishments or financial wealth but also about finding happiness in one's career, maintaining strong personal relationships, and living with integrity. The book provides practical strategies and theories to help individuals align their actions with their values and aspirations.

Table of Contents

1. Finding Happiness in Your Career
2. Finding Happiness in Your Relationships
3. Living with Integrity

Finding Happiness in Your Career

One of the greatest feelings in the world is to wake up every day thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing for a living. That doesn’t happen by accident – to achieve it and then sustain it, you need a three-part strategy:

"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." – Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

In the business world, much thought has been given to what motivates people to perform. From the mid-1970s onwards, incentives came to the fore – to get people to do good work, you pay them more money and align all the incentives in the direction of superior performance. That’s great, but there are some anomalies this theory cannot explain:

• Some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed by nonprofits and charities.
• The military attracts some remarkable people who work for a fraction of what they could earn in the private sector.

With that in mind, a second school of thought emerged which came to be termed the “Motivation Theory.” This second theory suggests incentives are not the same as motivation. Motivation can be defined as “getting people to do something because they want to do it.” Motivation theory distinguishes between two types of factors:

• Motivation factors: elements like doing challenging work, recognition, responsibility.
• Hygiene factors: elements which, if not done right, will cause dissatisfaction.

It turns out money or compensation is more of a hygiene factor than a motivation factor. If you’re being underpaid, you will notice it, but once you’re making a reasonable amount of money, the opportunity to make 10% more doesn’t really get your engine running. The real motivators turn out to be things like feeling that you make a meaningful contribution to what’s being achieved and that you have challenging work which will foster your own personal growth. Those are the real factors that cause you to love what you’re doing and to generate your best work.

"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." – Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

While money is a reasonable measure of professional success, it’s not the only metric and it’s not even the most important one for most people. Doing something that makes a difference in the world or tackling some vexing problem that affects lots of people can be pretty powerful motivators as well. So too are the opportunities to learn new things and to bring together a team of exceptional people who pull off something everyone assumed was impossible.

The cliché states: “Find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” The reality is if you find a job that you truly love, which pays enough for you to put your family on a secure financial footing and which you find meaningful in a way which resonates with your own values, then you’ll have a distinct advantage over others who are just showing up to pay the bills. You’ll throw your best efforts into your job, which will make you very good at what you do which, in turn, often means you’ll get paid well. Get your priorities right and everything else follows.

"For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy. Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. They are, after all, what our friends and family see as signs that we have 'made it' professionally. But as soon as you find yourself focusing on the tangible aspects of your job, you are at risk of becoming like some of my classmates, chasing a mirage. The next pay raise, you think, will be the one that finally makes you happy. It’s a hopeless quest." – Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine; you will, hopefully, find a field where you can maximize the motivators and satisfy the hygiene factors. But it’s rarely a case of sitting in an ivory tower and thinking through the problem until the answer pops into your head. 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.

"What we can learn from how companies develop strategy is that although it is hard to get it right at first, success doesn’t rely on this. Instead, it hinges on continuing to experiment until you do find an approach that works." – Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

In the business world, strategy typically evolves over time. Companies start out with a planned strategy but then modify it as unanticipated opportunities open up and as problems come along which once solved take things in a new direction altogether. A good example of this was Honda when it tried to break into the U.S. motorcycle market in the 1960s. Honda’s initial strategy to compete head-to-head with Harley-Davidson and Triumph by selling big bikes was unsuccessful. It wasn’t until some recreational dirt bikers saw Honda employees playing around on one of their Super-Cubs and they asked where to buy them that Honda realized there was an opportunity to target a different market niche. Honda changed its strategy and succeeded by selling Super-Cubs through the Sears mail-order catalog and in power equipment and sporting-goods stores rather than motorbike dealers.

Honda started with a “deliberate strategy” to compete in the big-bike market but ended up finding success with an “emergent strategy” to sell small-bikes instead. Strategy keeps evolving in an ongoing process which is unruly and patchy. Often the emergent strategy ends up becoming the deliberate strategy. This is the process which almost all successful companies use.

The same principle also applies in your career as well. Many students emerge from their educational experience with their careers planned out in fine detail. If this is you, then your career plan is your own life’s deliberate strategy. The reality is, however, unanticipated opportunities will arise and the hard choice is sometimes whether to stick to your original plan or take advantage of those new opportunities. You have to make a judgment call whether to stay with your deliberate strategy or hitch your wagon to an emergent strategy instead.