How Will You Measure Your Life?

“This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

How Will You Measure Your Life shows us how to live a successful life, be motivated in our careers, happy in our relationships, and how to stay out of jail.

This short book is filled with wonderful life advice, given through the lens of managing a successful business. Success is more than just money. Our friends and family are our greatest source of happiness in our lives.

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🌈 3 Sentence Summary

1. Learn how to think, rather than what to think. Develop theories that have predictive power, not memorize facts that can only provide limited hindsight.
2. The powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.
3. Start building the culture you want. Start early. Build a culture where everyone does the job they were supposed to do.

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💡 Thoughts

I bought this book during my pre-clinical years in India, and since then I've been trying to apply its principles into my life. The book pleasantly surprised me with its warm tone of voice, I expected a more academic-type book from a business professor.

I've always tried to do what I think is great work, and I only do great work when I love what I do. Christensen showed me that in order to love what I do, I have to keep learning new things, get recognition, and be in service of others.

I also need to start actively developing cultures. I usually just leave people to their own devices, since they're responsible for their own actions. I'll help them if they ask for it, otherwise I won't meddle in my neighbour's business. This book showed me that my relationships will benefit if I actively start the right culture. I'll have to ask the people around me which direction we want to go, and which actions will get us there.

👤 Should You Read It?

I think this book should be on everyone's required readings list. Most people are smart, highly trained in their academic field, but are still unhappy for some reason. This book shows you why. You'll enjoy it if:

• If you're not happy in your work, relationships, and life.
• If you're interested in business-y concepts.
• If you're trying to find your life's purpose.

🚀 Actionable Takeaways

• Think in terms of theories, not facts. Focus on the logic behind everything.
• Learn new things, get recognised, help others along the way.
• Ask people around you what your common goals are, and what steps you can take to get there.
• Stick to your principles 100% of the time.

✍️ Summary + Notes

💡 The Power of Theories

"When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models."

I don't have an opinion, the theory has an opinion. A good theory doesn't change its mind, applies generally to everyone or every company, and are describe cause and effect.

This is why theories are so much more powerful than historical facts. Theories have predictive power. Facts only offer limited hindsight. Although, I recall reading Daniel Kahneman writing that we shouldn't be too afraid to generalise stuff from individual occurrences.

💼 Finding Happiness in Your Career

"Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team."

First, know what motivates you. Don't only focus on hygiene factors (basic benefits) like pay, job security, status, vacations etc. The powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. Basically to be happy, we need:

• Growth
• Personal recognition
• Service

Secondly, have a deliberate strategy, but also look out for emergent strategies. I like to say it this way: planning is important, but plans are useless. You must learn to adjust your plans accordingly without losing your direction. Take advantage of lucky opportunities that come your way.

Once you have a strategy, allocate your resources accordingly. Your strategy is not what you say it is, it's how you actually spend your resources. Always test your assumptions before diving all the way in. Ask yourself "what must prove true?" before committing to allocate resources into a strategy.

💜 Finding Happiness in Your Relationships

"If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on."

The worst thing we can do is neglect our friends and family, as our relationships are our biggest source of happiness.

Start building the culture you want. Start early. Build a culture where everyone does the job they were hired to do. We enter into relationships searching for what we want, but don't forget that our partner and children entered the relationship wanting something in return too. We expect them to do the job they were "hired" to do, so we should also do the jobs that we were hired to do as well.

But how do we build a culture? To build a culture, we must do two things:

1. Clearly agree on what everyone wants (a common goal).
2. Agree on what actions will produce the desired results.

Then do those actions, 100% of the time without compromise. If there is no agreement on any one of these two things, we might resort to using quick-and-dirty "power tools" like threats, punishment, and coercion to gain cooperation. Things might go our way in the short-term, but there is no loyalty and trust, so people will begin to fight back in the long-term (e.g. power tools won't work for teens in their rebellious phase).

👮 Staying Out of Jail

"It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time."

In business, one way to decide which investment to make is to compare the marginal costs and marginal revenues of each choice.

We do this in our personal lives as well. We always tell ourselves "Yes, I know the general rule, most people shouldn't do this. But in this special circumstance, I think it's okay for me to do it just this once."

"The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails."

A lot of the big mistakes in life can be traced back to one moment when we justify our actions to "just this once".

The antidote to this marginal cost mistake is to be humble. Humble people have high self-esteem, and highly esteem others as well. Humble people would never do anything bad to someone else, because they respect others too much. There may not be very many people smarter than you, but there is still so much left to learn. Your fluid intelligence may very well be higher, but that doesn't mean your crystallized knowledge is.

📏 Choose the right yardstick

When Clayton M. Christensen was diagnosed with cancer, all external metric, all expectations, all pride, faded away.

He knows that he helped companies make enormous revenue from his ideas and research, but he concluded that God will not measure the value of his life by dollar amounts, but by the number of individual people whose lives he touched.

"This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

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