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How Will You Measure Your Life?

Jan 10, 2024, 55 min read

How Will You Measure Your Life?

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • People (Location 193)
  • 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. (Location 193)
  • why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it. (Location 197)
  • 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. (Location 244)
  • 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. (Location 253)
  • 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. (Location 255)
  • to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. (Location 261)
  • what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 285)
  • All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. (Location 288)
  • 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. (Location 297)
  • to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. (Location 356)
  • has been widely used as an argument for skyrocketing compensation under the guise of “aligning incentives.” (Location 359)
  • Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for (Location 363)
  • The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. (Location 370)
  • They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated. (Location 372)
  • military (Location 374)
  • they are not doing it for financial compensation. (Location 375)
  • And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work. (Location 376)
  • How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money? (Location 377)
  • two-factor theory, (Location 379)
  • or motivation theory—that (Location 379)
  • It acknowledges (Location 380)
  • 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. (Location 380)
  • job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting (Location 385)
  • Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time. (Location 387)
  • elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. (Location 390)
  • things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. (Location 391)
  • Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation. (Location 399)
  • if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. (Location 401)
  • The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. (Location 402)
  • these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it. (Location 406)
  • the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. (Location 408)
  • 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. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (Location 409)
  • How is it that people who seem to have the world at their feet end up making deliberate choices that leave them feeling unfulfilled? (Location 419)
  • had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these. (Location 421)
  • 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. (Location 442)
  • The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey. (Location 462)
  • the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. (Location 464)
  • if you want to help other people, be a manager. (Location 470)
  • You are in a position where 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 Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. (Location 471)
  • 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. (Location 476)
  • 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. (Location 478)
  • This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. (Location 480)
  • the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators. (Location 481)
  • easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. (Location 482)
  • 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. (Location 486)
  • 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. (Location 488)
  • Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. (Location 490)
  • 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. (Location 493)
  • You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. (Location 501)
  • options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the (Location 537)
  • The second source of options is unanticipated—usually (Location 540)
  • When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy. (Location 546)
  • When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy. (Location 551)
  • strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something (Location 553)
  • Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process. (Location 554)
  • Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers. (Location 564)
  • Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives. (Location 569)
  • 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. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present. (Location 573)
  • If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. (Location 578)
  • But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, (Location 581)
  • you need to be emergent. (Location 582)
  • experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. (Location 583)
  • 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. (Location 587)
  • “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?” (Location 637)
  • the time they have learned which assumptions were right and which were wrong, it’s too late to do anything about it. (Location 653)
  • it turned out that Disney did have around 11 million visitors in that first year. But, on average, they stayed only one day versus the three days they stayed in the other parks. What happened? In the other parks, Disney had built forty-five rides. This kept people happily occupied for three days. But Disneyland Paris opened its doors with only fifteen rides. You could do everything in just one day. (Location 666)
  • There is a much better way to figure out what is going to work and what isn’t. It involves reordering the typical steps involved in planning a new project. (Location 675)
  • ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, (Location 679)
  • while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain. (Location 682)
  • find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions. (Location 685)
  • this approach of “What assumptions must prove true?” offers a simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course. It causes teams to focus on what truly matters to get the numbers to materialize. (Location 689)
  • This type of planning can help you consider job opportunities, too. We all want to be successful and happy in our careers. But it’s all too easy to get too far down a path before you’ve realized that choices aren’t working out as you hoped. This tool can help you avoid doing just that. (Location 692)
  • Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” (Location 694)
  • ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. (Location 697)
  • 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. (Location 699)
  • 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. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success. (Location 727)
  • expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities. (Location 730)
  • be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust (Location 733)
  • your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators. (Location 733)
  • Only then does a deliberate strategy make sense. (Location 734)
  • Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. (Location 736)
  • and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: “What am I doing with my life?” (Location 737)
  • 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. (Location 742)
  • As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all. (Location 746)
  • we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives. These include having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other; raising great children; succeeding in our careers; contributing to our church or community; and so on. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. It’s exactly the same problem that a corporation has. How should we devote our resources to each of these pursuits? (Location 861)
  • As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process—and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. (Location 867)
  • But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices. (Location 869)
  • With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course, (Location 871)
  • The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. (Location 873)
  • They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. (Location 883)
  • they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. (Location 885)
  • Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most. (Location 894)
  • A strategy—whether (Location 899)
  • is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. (Location 899)
  • 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. (Location 900)
  • How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. (Location 904)
  • 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. (Location 908)
  • high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. (Location 928)
  • The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. (Location 977)
  • 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. (Location 980)
  • 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable. (Location 1010)
  • 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. (Location 1011)
  • in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit. (Location 1015)
  • capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. (Location 1021)
  • once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. (Location 1022)
  • Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model. (Location 1024)
  • The first step is that because the probability is so high that the initial plan isn’t viable, the investor needs to invest in the next wave of growth even while the original business is strong and growing—to give the new initiative the time to figure out a viable strategy. (Location 1028)
  • the next step, tomorrow arrives. The original core business has become mature and stops growing. The owner of the (Location 1032)
  • capital suddenly realizes that he should have invested several years earlier in the next growth business, so that when the core business stalled, the next engine of growth and profit would already be taking over as the engine for growth and profit. Instead, the engine just isn’t there. (Location 1033)
  • Third, the owner of the capital demands that any business that he invests in must become very big, very fast. (Location 1036)
  • Work becomes how we identify ourselves. We take our smartphones with us everywhere, checking for news constantly—as if not being connected all the time would mean we’re going to miss out on something really important. We expect the people who are closest to us to accept that our schedule is simply too demanding to make much time for them. After all, they want to see us succeed, too, right? (Location 1062)

title: How Will You Measure Your Life? author: Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon url: date: 2022-02-15 source: kindle tags: media/books

How Will You Measure Your Life?

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • People (Location 193)
  • 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. (Location 193)
  • why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it. (Location 197)
  • 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. (Location 244)
  • 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. (Location 253)
  • 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. (Location 255)
  • to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. (Location 261)
  • what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 285)
  • All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. (Location 288)
  • 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. (Location 297)
  • to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. (Location 356)
  • has been widely used as an argument for skyrocketing compensation under the guise of “aligning incentives.” (Location 359)
  • Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for (Location 363)
  • The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. (Location 370)
  • They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated. (Location 372)
  • military (Location 374)
  • they are not doing it for financial compensation. (Location 375)
  • And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work. (Location 376)
  • How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money? (Location 377)
  • two-factor theory, (Location 379)
  • or motivation theory—that (Location 379)
  • It acknowledges (Location 380)
  • 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. (Location 380)
  • job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting (Location 385)
  • Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time. (Location 387)
  • elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. (Location 390)
  • things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. (Location 391)
  • Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation. (Location 399)
  • if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. (Location 401)
  • The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. (Location 402)
  • these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it. (Location 406)
  • the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. (Location 408)
  • 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. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (Location 409)
  • How is it that people who seem to have the world at their feet end up making deliberate choices that leave them feeling unfulfilled? (Location 419)
  • had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these. (Location 421)
  • 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. (Location 442)
  • The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey. (Location 462)
  • the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. (Location 464)
  • if you want to help other people, be a manager. (Location 470)
  • You are in a position where 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 Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. (Location 471)
  • 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. (Location 476)
  • 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. (Location 478)
  • This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. (Location 480)
  • the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators. (Location 481)
  • easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. (Location 482)
  • 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. (Location 486)
  • 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. (Location 488)
  • Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. (Location 490)
  • 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. (Location 493)
  • You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. (Location 501)
  • options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the (Location 537)
  • The second source of options is unanticipated—usually (Location 540)
  • When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy. (Location 546)
  • When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy. (Location 551)
  • strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something (Location 553)
  • Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process. (Location 554)
  • Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers. (Location 564)
  • Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives. (Location 569)
  • 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. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present. (Location 573)
  • If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. (Location 578)
  • But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, (Location 581)
  • you need to be emergent. (Location 582)
  • experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. (Location 583)
  • 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. (Location 587)
  • “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?” (Location 637)
  • the time they have learned which assumptions were right and which were wrong, it’s too late to do anything about it. (Location 653)
  • it turned out that Disney did have around 11 million visitors in that first year. But, on average, they stayed only one day versus the three days they stayed in the other parks. What happened? In the other parks, Disney had built forty-five rides. This kept people happily occupied for three days. But Disneyland Paris opened its doors with only fifteen rides. You could do everything in just one day. (Location 666)
  • There is a much better way to figure out what is going to work and what isn’t. It involves reordering the typical steps involved in planning a new project. (Location 675)
  • ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, (Location 679)
  • while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain. (Location 682)
  • find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions. (Location 685)
  • this approach of “What assumptions must prove true?” offers a simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course. It causes teams to focus on what truly matters to get the numbers to materialize. (Location 689)
  • This type of planning can help you consider job opportunities, too. We all want to be successful and happy in our careers. But it’s all too easy to get too far down a path before you’ve realized that choices aren’t working out as you hoped. This tool can help you avoid doing just that. (Location 692)
  • Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” (Location 694)
  • ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. (Location 697)
  • 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. (Location 699)
  • 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. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success. (Location 727)
  • expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities. (Location 730)
  • be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust (Location 733)
  • your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators. (Location 733)
  • Only then does a deliberate strategy make sense. (Location 734)
  • Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. (Location 736)
  • and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: “What am I doing with my life?” (Location 737)
  • 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. (Location 742)
  • As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all. (Location 746)
  • we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives. These include having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other; raising great children; succeeding in our careers; contributing to our church or community; and so on. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. It’s exactly the same problem that a corporation has. How should we devote our resources to each of these pursuits? (Location 861)
  • As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process—and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. (Location 867)
  • But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices. (Location 869)
  • With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course, (Location 871)
  • The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. (Location 873)
  • They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. (Location 883)
  • they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. (Location 885)
  • Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most. (Location 894)
  • A strategy—whether (Location 899)
  • is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. (Location 899)
  • 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. (Location 900)
  • How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. (Location 904)
  • 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. (Location 908)
  • high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. (Location 928)
  • The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. (Location 977)
  • 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. (Location 980)
  • 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable. (Location 1010)
  • 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. (Location 1011)
  • in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit. (Location 1015)
  • capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. (Location 1021)
  • once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. (Location 1022)
  • Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model. (Location 1024)
  • The first step is that because the probability is so high that the initial plan isn’t viable, the investor needs to invest in the next wave of growth even while the original business is strong and growing—to give the new initiative the time to figure out a viable strategy. (Location 1028)
  • the next step, tomorrow arrives. The original core business has become mature and stops growing. The owner of the (Location 1032)
  • capital suddenly realizes that he should have invested several years earlier in the next growth business, so that when the core business stalled, the next engine of growth and profit would already be taking over as the engine for growth and profit. Instead, the engine just isn’t there. (Location 1033)
  • Third, the owner of the capital demands that any business that he invests in must become very big, very fast. (Location 1036)
  • Work becomes how we identify ourselves. We take our smartphones with us everywhere, checking for news constantly—as if not being connected all the time would mean we’re going to miss out on something really important. We expect the people who are closest to us to accept that our schedule is simply too demanding to make much time for them. After all, they want to see us succeed, too, right? (Location 1062)

title: “How Will You Measure Your Life?” author: “Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

How Will You Measure Your Life?

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Metadata

Highlights

  • People (Location 193)
  • 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. (Location 193)
  • why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it. (Location 197)
  • 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. (Location 244)
  • 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. (Location 253)
  • 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. (Location 255)
  • to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. (Location 261)
  • what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 276)
  • 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. (Location 285)
  • All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. (Location 288)
  • to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. (Location 356)
  • has been widely used as an argument for skyrocketing compensation under the guise of “aligning incentives.” (Location 359)
  • Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for (Location 363)
  • The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. (Location 370)
  • They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated. (Location 372)
  • military (Location 374)
  • they are not doing it for financial compensation. (Location 375)
  • And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work. (Location 376)
  • How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money? (Location 377)
  • two-factor theory, (Location 379)
  • or motivation theory—that (Location 379)
  • It acknowledges (Location 380)
  • 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. (Location 380)
  • job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting (Location 385)
  • Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time. (Location 387)
  • elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. (Location 390)
  • things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. (Location 391)
  • Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation. (Location 399)
  • if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. (Location 401)
  • The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. (Location 402)
  • these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it. (Location 406)
  • the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. (Location 408)
  • 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. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (Location 409)
  • How is it that people who seem to have the world at their feet end up making deliberate choices that leave them feeling unfulfilled? (Location 419)
  • had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these. (Location 421)
  • 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. (Location 442)
  • The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey. (Location 462)
  • the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. (Location 464)
  • if you want to help other people, be a manager. (Location 470)
  • You are in a position where 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 Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. (Location 471)
  • 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. (Location 476)
  • 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. (Location 478)
  • This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. (Location 480)
  • the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators. (Location 481)
  • easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. (Location 482)
  • 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. (Location 486)
  • 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. (Location 488)
  • Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. (Location 490)
  • 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. (Location 493)
  • You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. (Location 501)
  • options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the (Location 537)
  • The second source of options is unanticipated—usually (Location 540)
  • When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy. (Location 546)
  • When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy. (Location 551)
  • strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something (Location 553)
  • Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process. (Location 554)
  • Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers. (Location 564)
  • Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives. (Location 569)
  • 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. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present. (Location 573)
  • If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. (Location 578)
  • But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, (Location 581)
  • you need to be emergent. (Location 582)
  • experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. (Location 583)
  • 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. (Location 587)
  • “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?” (Location 637)
  • the time they have learned which assumptions were right and which were wrong, it’s too late to do anything about it. (Location 653)
  • it turned out that Disney did have around 11 million visitors in that first year. But, on average, they stayed only one day versus the three days they stayed in the other parks. What happened? In the other parks, Disney had built forty-five rides. This kept people happily occupied for three days. But Disneyland Paris opened its doors with only fifteen rides. You could do everything in just one day. (Location 666)
  • There is a much better way to figure out what is going to work and what isn’t. It involves reordering the typical steps involved in planning a new project. (Location 675)
  • ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, (Location 679)
  • while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain. (Location 682)
  • find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions. (Location 685)
  • this approach of “What assumptions must prove true?” offers a simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course. It causes teams to focus on what truly matters to get the numbers to materialize. (Location 689)
  • This type of planning can help you consider job opportunities, too. We all want to be successful and happy in our careers. But it’s all too easy to get too far down a path before you’ve realized that choices aren’t working out as you hoped. This tool can help you avoid doing just that. (Location 692)
  • Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” (Location 694)
  • ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. (Location 697)
  • 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. (Location 699)
  • 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. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success. (Location 727)
  • expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities. (Location 730)
  • be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust (Location 733)
  • your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators. (Location 733)
  • Only then does a deliberate strategy make sense. (Location 734)
  • Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. (Location 736)
  • and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: “What am I doing with my life?” (Location 737)
  • 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. (Location 742)
  • As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all. (Location 746)
  • we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives. These include having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other; raising great children; succeeding in our careers; contributing to our church or community; and so on. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. It’s exactly the same problem that a corporation has. How should we devote our resources to each of these pursuits? (Location 861)
  • As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process—and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. (Location 867)
  • But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices. (Location 869)
  • With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course, (Location 871)
  • The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. (Location 873)
  • They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. (Location 883)
  • they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. (Location 885)
  • Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most. (Location 894)
  • A strategy—whether (Location 899)
  • is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. (Location 899)
  • 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. (Location 900)
  • How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. (Location 904)
  • 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. (Location 908)
  • high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. (Location 928)
  • The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. (Location 977)
  • 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. (Location 980)
  • 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable. (Location 1010)
  • 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. (Location 1011)
  • in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit. (Location 1015)
  • capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. (Location 1021)
  • once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. (Location 1022)
  • Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model. (Location 1024)
  • The first step is that because the probability is so high that the initial plan isn’t viable, the investor needs to invest in the next wave of growth even while the original business is strong and growing—to give the new initiative the time to figure out a viable strategy. (Location 1028)
  • the next step, tomorrow arrives. The original core business has become mature and stops growing. The owner of the (Location 1032)
  • capital suddenly realizes that he should have invested several years earlier in the next growth business, so that when the core business stalled, the next engine of growth and profit would already be taking over as the engine for growth and profit. Instead, the engine just isn’t there. (Location 1033)
  • Third, the owner of the capital demands that any business that he invests in must become very big, very fast. (Location 1036)
  • Work becomes how we identify ourselves. We take our smartphones with us everywhere, checking for news constantly—as if not being connected all the time would mean we’re going to miss out on something really important. We expect the people who are closest to us to accept that our schedule is simply too demanding to make much time for them. After all, they want to see us succeed, too, right? (Location 1062)

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