How Will You Measure Your Life?

“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.”

Christensen insists that introspection is what ultimately leads us to overcome challenges. He believes that underlying misunderstandings create problems in our lives and that searching ourselves positions us to overcome them.

“The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.”

Christensen believes job satisfaction is a result of motivating factors such as an appropriate amount of challenge. When an employee is intrinsically motivated, they are far more likely to be satisfied with their job. Furthermore, job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not static measurements; they often change.

“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 extrinsic prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.”

Christensen distinguishes intrinsic motivation from extrinsic hygiene factors, which include compensation and other financial perks. Intrinsic motivation is more sustainable and provides meaning in both the professional and personal spheres.

“The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.”

While Christensen tends to place higher value on intrinsic motivation, he recognizes the importance of hygiene factors. He is careful to point out that financial compensation is an important factor when considering a career; however, if it becomes the sole factor, it can interfere with one’s lasting happiness.

“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.”

Christensen maintains that people need to have challenging but achievable goals. Meeting a goal provides one’s life with deeper meaning compared to superficial measures of achievement such as financial rewards.

“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.”

In this quote and chapter as a whole, Christensen explores deliberate and emergent strategies—specifically, the balance between the two. He suggests that one should be adaptable to new opportunities yet still try to plan ahead.

“What we can learn from how companies develop strategy is that although it is hard to get it right at first, success doesn’t rely on this. Instead, it hinges on continuing to experiment until you do find an approach that works. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success.”

More often than not, plans do not always pan out the way they’re intended. For this reason, learning how to develop responsive strategies—emergent strategies—is an essential skill to keep one afloat.

“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.”

Resources include things like time, energy, and money. Christensen urges readers to be intentional about how they use their resources, as this usage should match their values.

“In baseball terms, however, instead of exciting new ‘home run’ products, its innovators often produce instead bunts and singles—year after year.”

Christensen uses an analogy to describe the innovator’s dilemma, a tendency to focus on short-term gains instead of long-term rewards. In baseball, a bunt or a single is something, which is better than nothing but not as good as a homerun; Christensen suggests that in business, many innovators follow the same mindset and settle for short-term gains.

“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.”

In discussing resource allocation, Christensen reiterates that we must be intentional about how and where we spend our time, energy, and money. Otherwise, we risk losing touch with what matters most to us, as was the case for many of Christensen’s classmates at Harvard who lost their sense of ethics and relationships, among other things.

“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.”

Christensen’s argument follows the idea that one should not take things for granted. Following a general principle in business, he argues that when things seem to be going well, one should not expect this peace to last indefinitely. Instead, one should consistently invest in relationships to keep them strong.

“If a company has ignored investing in new businesses until it needs those new sources of revenue and profits, it’s already too late. It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.”

Like a company and personal relationships, one should not take the future for granted. One needs to balance immediate needs with long-term goals.

“Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve. The same is true in our relationships: we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.”

A successful business is able to deliver what customers want by taking measures to better understand them. Christensen applies this idea to relationships and suggests that the path to a happy relationship begins with learning what the other person needs.

“In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.”

Christensen’s argument follows the idea that adversity builds character. The harder one works toward something, including relationships, the more this work builds a stronger commitment to it.

“At the beginning, American companies outsourced simple things to drive costs down and get assets off their balance sheets. As is often the case, each of the decisions by themselves seemed to make sense. Now, however, they must outsource sophisticated products because they can no longer make them.”

As per the perils of outsourcing, relying on others can lead a company to undercut itself. Christensen argues that in business, one should be wary of outsourcing capabilities to others; this also applies to parenting, specifically teaching one’s children values.

“Many parents are making the same mistake, flooding their children with resources—knowledge, skills, and experiences. And just as with Dell, each of the decisions to do so seems to make sense. We want our kids to get ahead, and believe that the opportunities and experiences we have provided for them will help them do exactly that. But the nature of these activities—experiences in which they’re not deeply engaged and that don’t really challenge them to do hard things—denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they’ll need to succeed in the future.”

Christensen examines the way Dell outsourced its capabilities to the point of only being a computer brand in name. As outsourcing applies to parenting, he warns that both failing to be present for one’s children and providing too many resources to one’s children denies them the opportunity to develop skills such as coping with failure and problem-solving.

“Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent.”

Christensen argues that children should be guided through difficulties, not sheltered from them, so they can learn to cope with and grow from adversity. Sheltering children is often a well-intentioned but crucial mistake in parenting.

“When you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it.”

Failure is inevitable, so the best way to cope with and understand it is to experience it early on. Christensen warns against shielding children from failure, as this prevents them from learning how to face it in a healthy way.

“Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.”

Christensen borrows from the work of Edgar Schein, a notable expert in the field of organizational management, to describe the creation of culture. In business, culture itself creates an environment in which a company’s priorities guide employees more so than hands-on management.

“Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.”

Christensen applies his discussion of culture to the context of family and warns that inconsistency will often lead to an undesirable counterculture. In other words, a lack of culture can and will become its own culture.

“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

Christensen suggests that when people deviate from their chosen path, they usually do so unintentionally. However, a single deviation from one’s values is all it takes to spiral. As evidence, Christensen describes the fall of Nick Leeson, a former trader who covered up a single mistake and eventually bankrupted his company and landed himself in prison.

“The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed.”

Christensen urges readers to consider the purpose of their lives and provides a strategy for developing this purpose. He believes this sense of agency and control over one’s life is necessary due to life’s unpredictability.

“Now let me explain in religious terms: I realized that God, in contrast to us, does not need the tools of statisticians or accountants. So far as I know, He has no organization charts. There is no need to aggregate anything beyond the level of an individual person in order to comprehend completely what is going on among humankind. His only measure of achievement is the individual.”

For Christensen, religion is a crucial aspect of his purpose. Since being a devoted worshiper of God is important to him, the metric he uses to define success ultimately rests in God’s judgment.