How Will You Measure Your Life?. Clayton Christensen
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took other work—such as understanding gravity and resistance—to fully explain flight.
Each chapter of this book highlights a theory as it might apply to a particular challenge. 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. The way I’ve paired the challenges and theories in the subsequent chapters is based on how my students and I have discussed them in class. I invite you, as you journey through the book, to go back to theories in earlier chapters, just as my students do, and explore the problems through the perspective of multiple theories, too.
These theories are powerful tools. I have applied many of them in my own life; others I wish I’d had available to me when I was younger, struggling with a problem. You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant. 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.
You might be tempted to try to make decisions in your life based on what you know has happened in the past or what has happened to other people. You should learn all that you can from the past; from scholars who have studied it, and from people who have gone through problems of the sort that you are likely to face. But this doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into the future. Instead, using robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of success. The theories in this book are based on a deep understanding of human endeavor—what causes what to happen, and why. They’ve been rigorously examined and used in organizations all over the globe, and can help all of us with decisions that we make every day in our lives, too.
SECTION I
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
WHEN YOU WERE ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut. Archaeologist. Fireman. Baseball player. The first female president of the United States. Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits.
There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that’s truly meaningful to them. But for many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.
Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it’s a compromise that will always eat away at you.
But you need not resign yourself to this fate.
I had been out of college and in the working world for years before I figured out that I could make it back to school to teach and develop a generation of wonderful young people. For a long time, I had no idea that this might be possible. Now there’s nothing I would rather be doing. Every day I think of how fortunate I am.
I want you to be able to experience that feeling—to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. Together, in the next chapters, we’re going to build a strategy for you to do exactly that.
A strategy? At a basic level, a strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there. In the business world, this is the result of multiple influences: what a company’s priorities are, how a company responds to opportunities and threats along the way, and how a company allocates its precious resources. These things all continuously combine, to create and evolve a strategy.
You don’t need to think about this for more than a minute, however, before you realize that this same strategy-making process is at work in every one of us as well. We have intentions for our careers. Against those intentions, opportunities and threats emerge that we haven’t anticipated. And how we allocate our resources—our time, talent, and energies—is how we determine the actual strategy of our lives. Occasionally, the actual strategy maps quite closely with what we intended. But often what we actually end up doing is very different from what we set out to do.
The art of managing this, however, is not to simply stomp out anything that was not a part of the original plan. Among those threats and opportunities that we didn’t anticipate, there are almost always better options than were contained in our original plans. The strategist in us needs to figure out what these better things are, and then manage our resources in order to nourish them.
The following chapters are all designed to help you leverage these concepts in answering the question “How can I find happiness in my career?”
The starting point for our journey is a discussion of priorities. These are, in effect, your core decision-making criteria: 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. Even worse, we don’t notice that gap until it’s too late. To help you avoid this mistake, I want to discuss the best research we have on what truly motivates people.
Following this, I will outline how best to balance our plans to find something that we truly love doing with the opportunities and challenges that we never expected to arise in our lives. While some people will argue that you should always have the next five years of your life planned out, others have followed a strategy of just seeing what has come along and will tell you that it’s worked well for them. There’s a time and a place for both approaches. Drawing on our research, I will explain what the best circumstances are to be deliberate, to have that plan; and when it’s best to be emergent—to be open to the unexpected.
The final element is execution. 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. 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.
All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. The process is continuous: even as your strategy begins to take shape, you’ll learn new things, and new problems and opportunities will always emerge. They’ll feed back in; the cycle is continuous.
If you can understand and manage this strategy process, you’ll have the best shot at getting it right—of having a career that you will truly love.
Even if you don’t end up getting to be an astronaut.
CHAPTER TWO
What Makes Us Tick
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.
The Importance of Getting Motivation Right
When I was running CPS Technologies, a company that I founded with several MIT professors early in my career, I had an epiphany of sorts about what motivates us. One summer Saturday, we had a company picnic for our employees’ families in a park near our laboratories. There was nothing fancy about it, but it was a