How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton Christensen

📚 GENRE: Miscellaneous

📃 PAGES: 240

✅ COMPLETED: October 1, 2018

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen explains how to live with integrity and purpose, giving career, marriage, relationships, and life advice along the way. Christensen uses theories to make his points, and weaves business inspiration with conventional wisdom to show how integrity can be measured and refined. 

Key Takeaways

1ïžâƒŁ Spend Your Resources Wisely — We all have a limited amount of time, energy, and money. You need to be mindful of where you are directing your resources. Try to always direct your resources towards your goals and passions. 

2ïžâƒŁ Family First — Many high-achievers are fixated on accomplishing goals at work and begin to neglect their family and other relationships in the process. This is a recipe for disaster. Building a family and maintaining good relationships takes a lot of work. Family needs to be your No. 1, always. 

3ïžâƒŁ Don’t Compromise Yourself — Living with integrity means sticking by your values ALL THE TIME. Try to avoid allowing any exceptions. Identify your purpose and values and hold yourself to your standards no matter what. 

Favorite Quote

"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."

Book Notes 📑

Prologue

  • Clayton Christensen graduated from Harvard and is a business teacher there now.
  • At 10, 20, 30-year reunions Christensen noticed that some of his classmates were happy and some were not.
    • Some were divorced and estranged from kids. Christensen wondered why.
  • Christensen‘s class at Harvard studies business theory and how leaders of companies impact the business.
  • On the last day of class, Christensen asks students to turn theories on themselves. He asks three key questions:
    1. How can I ensure that I will be happy and successful in my career?
    2. How can I ensure my relationships with family, kids will be an enduring source of happiness?
    3. How can I ensure I will stay out of jail and live with integrity?

Chapter 1

  • Christensen likes to look at things using theories.
    • He went to California to talk to Intel’s CEO and gave his theory on disruption, which describes a process where businesses will enter a field making an inferior product and develop into a big player.
    • His speech inspired Intel to change its own strategies.
  • Theories are general statements that describe what causes what and why.
    • Theories apply to anybody, no matter what.
    • Theories can tell you what will happen before it actually happens.
    • Good theories dispense information in “if”, “then” statements.
  • There are no ‘quick fixes’ in life.
    • Solving challenges in life requires understanding of “what causes what to happen.”
    • Some challenges take multiple theories to solve. 
    • The theories in this book have been researched and tested rigorously. They have helped the author in his life tremendously.
  • Do what you love in life, especially with your career. 
    • How we allocate our time, resources, and energy defines our life.
      • Many people get off track with how they deploy these resources. 
      • You have to be very strategic with how you use your time, resources, and energy. 
        • Try to be efficient. 

Chapter 2

  • Motivation Theory — True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it.
    • Christensen used to run his own company. He used to imagine one of his employees leaving the house in the morning feeling good. After a long day of work and feeling under-appreciated, the employee comes home in a poor mood.
      • This visualization led Christensen to conclude that money ultimately does not motivate people completely. Rather, opportunities to learn, grow, and positively impact people are true motivators.
    • As a business, you have to compensate people correctly, provide a clean and stable working environment, and provide good relationships with managers. But this just ensures that the employee won’t hate their job. 
      • Challenging work, recognition, responsibility, personal growth, and feeling that you are making an impact are what really drive people.

Chapter 3

  • Emergent Strategy — it’s important to have a plan in life, but you must be able to adapt. Every great business has hard to adapt.
    • It’s important to use an emergent strategy to experiment and find what you love to do. Once you found what you want to do, develop a ‘deliberate strategy’ where you plan things out in great detail.
    • Ex. Honda — When Honda wanted to enter the motorcycle business, it started by making a ‘Super Cub’, which was a small motorcycle they sold for very cheap to try to steal 10% of the motorcycle industry sales against competition like Harley.
      • They got off to a horrible start. They had issues with the bikes and sales were not going well. One day, an employee took one of the ‘Super Cub’ bikes to the hills in LA and people started to ask him what he was riding. 
      • Soon, Sears was asking to sell the bikes in their catalog and sales exploded. It became clear that Honda needed to embrace the small bikes, even though they really wanted to make big bikes that could compete with Harley. 
      • Honda eventually embraced the small bikes and the rest is history.

Chapter 4

  • How do you spend your resources? (Time, Money, Energy)
    • You must be efficient with your time and spend your resources in accordance to your goals and strategies.
  • We have to be mindful with how we’re using our resources because, like a business, we have many goals pulling at us, and we have limited time.
    • These goals are begging for our attention, but some are more important than others and some can’t be done within our limited time every day.
      • We need to be very efficient with our time and we need to be good at prioritizing.
  • Management — How we chop the trees. The efficiency that we go about our work. How well we do our work.
  • Leadership — Making sure we’re chopping in the right jungle. 
  • The danger with high-achieving people is that they will often allocate their resources towards short-term achievements and goals and ignore long-term, meaningful achievements (like family).
    • High achievers often overlook their family relationships in favor of short-term work goals. This is a problem. 
  • How you allocate your resources will dictate your life path.
    • Long-term life goals (family, raising kids, spending time with loved ones) take work.
      • Some people ignore these goals in favor of short-term achievements at work and their family life suffers.
  • Your career will be the earliest possible way to make strides, but not the most meaningful.
    • The most meaningful achievements require patience because they are rooted in family relationships.
    • Building family relationships is not easy. It requires perseverance. 
  • Quote: “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.”

Chapter 5

  • Family and friend relationships are a huge source of happiness.
  • If things are going great at home, it does not mean you should put your family relationships on the back burner.
    • Even when things are going well with family, keep investing time there.
  • Invest in your personal relationships!
    • You don’t want to be divorced and estranged from your kids because you cared too much about your career.
  • Investments of time cannot be sequenced.
    • You can’t put all your focus on your career when the kids are tiny, then flip a switch and care about them later on.
      • Doesn’t work like that. 
  • Speak to your baby a lot. Research has shown that talking to kids in the baby stage helps a lot.
    • You can speak face-to-face, adult style. The effects on cognitive development are huge. 
    • Talk to the child like a normal person. Make them think!
    • Don’t assume you can’t talk to your kid just because he/she is a baby.

Chapter 6

  • Many products fail because companies focus too much on what they want to sell to the customer, rather than what the customer needs.
    • What is needed is empathy and an understanding of what problems customers want to solve.
      • This is the essence of good marketing. 
    • It’s the same with relationships. We focus too much on what we want rather than what’s important to the other person.
  • Business Thought — We “hire” products to solve our problems.
    • When a problem arises, we “hire” or buy the product to fix it.
  • IKEA does a great job. The company’s business model is entirely built on helping people and making things very convenient.
    • If you move and need your place to be furnished quickly, you can get everything in one stop at IKEA.
      • Their customer experience sets them apart. Delivery, kids play area, restaurant — everything is tailored towards providing a great product and a great, convenient experience.
  • Addressing problems is what causes a purchase from a customer.
    • If the product is good but doesn’t address a problem, it won’t be successful.
    • Ex. V8 — V8 started out trying to compete with apple juice, orange juice, and Gatorade. But the product struggled.
      • V8 eventually realized its drink allows people to get their servings of vegetables and avoid the time and hassle of preparing vegetables. They’ve marketed the product in that way ever since and have quadrupled their sales.
  • If you understand the job you’re being hired to do, at home and at work, the payoff is huge.
    • Put yourself in your spouse’s shoes and life. See life from her perspective.
    • Don’t give your spouse what you think she needs. Give her what she really wants and needs.
      • Never assume what she wants or needs.
        • Ex. A guy comes home, does the dishes, makes the kids food, but his wife was upset because he hadn’t asked about her day. She felt ignored.
  • The path to happiness in a relationship is about finding someone that makes you happy and someone that you want to make happy
 Somebody whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.
    • You have to sacrifice yourself to make her happy and vice versa.
      • Family deserves sacrifice.
  • Constantly ask yourself this question:
    •  “What is the job my spouse needs me to do?”

Chapter 7

  • Factors that determine what a company can or can’t do:
    1. Resources — People and money.
    2. Processes — How products are developed and made. 
    3. Priorities — How a company makes its decisions.
      • What a company will do and what it will not do. 
      • Employees must know a company’s priorities and abide by them.
  • As a parent, you can help kids get it right by shielding them from mistakes you made. 
    • Learn from your mistakes and pass those lessons on to your kids. 
  • Find simple problems for your kids to solve as they are growing up. This builds their self-esteem.
    • Don’t do everything for your kid. Allow them to do tasks, learn from mistakes, and grow. 
      • Don’t coddle your kids. 
  • Challenge your kids. Be there to help them solve problems. Be there to help them achieve their dreams. Be there to pick them up when they fall.

Chapter 8

  • Helping your kids learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles you have as a parent.
    • This equips them at a young age to handle challenges in life. 
      • It hardens them. 
  • You can create challenges — or point your kids towards challenges — that are designed to provide them with the experience they will need in life. 
    • Ex. Working under pressure
    • Ex. Leading a team
    • Ex. Planning something
    • Ex. Starting a project 
  • Kids need to fail. And they need you to pick them up when they do fail.
    • Again, do not coddle the kids. Challenge them and have them go through a little adversity as they grow up. 
  • Don’t bail your kids out if they have messed up. They need to learn accountability.
    • Ex. School Project — Your kid procrastinates and says he a has a project due tomorrow that he hasn’t started. You could do the project for him so he gets a good grade. Or you can teach him accountability by not helping. 
  • Do not shield your kids from problems or difficulties.
  • Think about the traits and qualities you want your kid to have, then figure out what experiences will help them get those abilities.
    • You may have to “create” situations that challenge them and develop those abilities in them.
  • Many parents try to “build their child’s rĂ©sumĂ©â€ by putting them in activities just for the heck of it, where the child is not engaged and isn’t being challenged.
    • Do not do this. Build your kid up by challenging him/her in a way that will develop the key traits that will prepare him/her for life’s challenges.

Chapter 9

  • Culture is how you develop great kids and a happy spouse.
    • Culture is how you teach kids to make good decisions when you are not there.
    • Culture starts right away, when the kids are very, very young.
  • Culture — A way of working together towards common goals that has been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about doing things in a different way.
    • Culture is effective when people instinctively know what to do and how to do it and what decisions are best.
    • Ex. Pixar — People are brutally honest with directors. The company has been so successful that people don’t fear being honest with each other because they know this method helps create great movies.
  • Culture is formed through repetition. Repeatedly doing things in a certain way and manner that continuously produces a successful outcome.
    • Building a culture in family life works the same way.
    • “This is the way our family behaves.” — this is the idea. 
  • The priorities and values you want for your family must be built into the culture.
    • Ex. Kindness — The first time your kid approaches a situation where kindness is an option, help him choose kindness. Then help him succeed through kindness. If he doesn’t choose kindness, call him out on it and explain why he should have chosen kindness.
      • This is how you build culture and teach your kids values. 
  • Think of the culture you want for your family. Choose the elements you want in your culture, then actively engineer the culture to emphasize those elements.
    • This entails choosing what activities to pursue and what outcomes you want to see with your kids.
      • Ex. Christensen wanted his kids to love work. So he found ways for his kids to work together with he and his wife and made it fun. He had the kids hang on to the lawnmower while he mowed. It was fun for the kids and he made sure to let them know they were helping a lot.
  • Building culture takes a lot of effort. You have to be thinking ahead.
    • You have to think creatively and think about the challenges that will build character with your kids. Then point them towards those challenges and be there to pick them up when they fall short. 
  • A family culture is going to develop either way. You can either shape it or allow it to shape itself (not recommended).
    • Ex. Allowing kids to get away with a couple of disrespectful comments.
      • That is the beginning of a bad culture that you don’t want to see develop. 

Chapter 10

  • Living with integrity means rejecting the “I’ll do this just this one time” mentality. 
    • Apply your values and rules ALL THE TIME, not some of the time.
    • Breaking the rules “just this once” leads to more and more bad decisions.
    • Decide what you want to stand for, then stand for it all the time. 
      • That’s living with integrity. 

Epilogue

  • Everybody has a purpose. Spend time thinking about your purpose.
  • The 3 Components of Purpose
    1. Likeness — Person I want to become.
    2. Commitment — Commit to your likeness. Commit to being the person you want to be.
    3. Metrics — So you can measure your progress. 
  • Trophies and medals are not the metric you want for success. 
    • The right metric revolves around how many people you’ve positively impacted. How many people have you helped.
  • It’s not about you!
    • Focusing on you and your problems is where you run into issues.
    • Focus on other people and how you can help them.