How Will You Measure Your Life

Last updated Sep 20, 2022 Edit Source

• Book

My classmates were not only some of the brightest people I’ve known, but some of the most decent people, too. At graduation they had plans and visions for what they would accomplish, not just in their careers, but in their personal lives as well. Yet something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed. I sensed that they felt embarrassed to explain to their friends the contrast in the trajectories of their personal and professional lives.

I read this book toward the end of the summer, during a time in my life when I felt confused about many things. For months, I have felt burnt out about the so-called “entrepreneurial ecosystem” at Stanford. In September, it felt nice to be away from Stanford for a bit when I was home with my family. Now I’m back in the thick of it all - biking frantically from place to place, having more people to meet than I have time for, doing the mental calculus of figuring out where to be, and desperately wanting to be in two places at once.

The truth is that Stanford is a daunting place. I was reading the transcript of an AOPS session with college advice. The question posed was an interesting one: “What are some of the main ways that smart / high achieving kids fail once they get to Stanford? And what is the main advice you’d have for preventing (or recovering) from that failure?” The student gave an insightful answer:

There are definitely new challenges here that can be hard to adapt to, such as the fact that you’re suddenly surrounded by many more brilliant people, and the classes are much harder but also often more flexible, with the result that you’re responsible for keeping yourself on schedule and not falling behind…accept that things are going to be harder now and that this is a good thing.

No one at Stanford is mediocre or unmotivated. And when everyone around you is brilliant, thriving, and working incredibly hard, it is very easy to feel inadequate. It is equally easy to get competitive about the wrong things.

And I think that’s the audience Christensen writes for — people who are doing so much that they lose track of what really matters. Reading How Will You Measure Your Life felt grounding. It’s a crazy hodgepodge of a book with one main idea but so many smaller takeaways. I think this book would have transformed my parents’ lives had they read it in their twenties and early thirties, and I’m glad to be reading it now.

It feels jarring to see such blurred lines between running a business and a family - but that’s the approach Christensen takes to his writing. I would read a case about a steel mill and then some personal anecdote on the value of integrity.

He argues that studying cases and theories provides not only a static snapshot, but also rich stories (story templates?) that are generalizable.

“You can replace the actors in our movies — different people, companies, and industries — and watch the movie again. You can choose the actions that these actors take in the movie. Because the plots in these movies are grounded in theories of causality, however, the results of these actions are perfectly predictable.” (208)

Whereas anecdotes and experiences reflect correlation, theories reflect causality. Theories are a more effective method of learning because they are not reliant on past experiences — they help us categorize events; understand why and how things happen; predict what problems and opportunities will occur and what actions to take. It makes sense that theories describing management can also teach us about success and happiness in 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.”

Values, culture - these things matter so much in organizations and in our lives

Christensen is a very principled person. Trump is disgusting

• Mike Maples

• Mamoon - Kleiner Perkins

• “I learned about the power of this approach in 1997, before I published my first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma I got a call from Andy Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had heard of one of my early academic papers about disruptive innovation, and asked me to come to Santa Clara to explain my research and tell him and his top team what it implied for Intel.” → going to the bottom of the market to launch the lower-priced Celeron processor.

Concepts

• Strategy 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

• There are hygiene and motivation factors. Money is not the primary motivator.

  • Principal-agent, or incentives theory: people work in accordance with how you pay them. You have to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. That way, if the stock goes up, executives are compensated better, and it makes both shareholders and executives happy.

  • Two-factor theory, or motivation theory: you can pay people to want what you want—over and over again. But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.”

  • Herzberg: satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. It’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.

    • hygiene factors: status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices; if not done right, these will cause us to be dissatisfied

    • motivation factors: 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. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work”

  • “It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. I shudder to think that I almost bought a kit from which I could have quickly assembled the playhouse myself.”

• “When people ask me something, I now rarely answer directly. Instead, I run the question through a theory in my own mind, so I know what the theory says is likely to be the result of one course of action, compared to another. I’ll then explain how it applies to their question. To be sure they understand it, I’ll describe to them how the process in the model worked its way through an industry or situation different from their own, to help them visualize how it works. People, typically, then say, “Okay, I get it.” They’ll then answer their question with more insight than I could possibly have.”

• “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

• “Money is [not] the root cause of professional unhappiness. 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.”

• “If you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions… you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like [they are] living a life filled with motivators.”

This book was chock full of great questions.

The basics: How will you measure your life?

• How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career?

• How can my relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?

• Can I live a life of integrity—and stay out of jail?

How do you find work you will love?

• What’s most important to you in your career?

• 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.”

• Why did you come here?

• 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?

Probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you: look for anomalies, and ask: is there something that the theory cannot explain?