# How Will You Measure Your Life?

![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/default-book-icon-7.09749d3efd49.png)
[[ReadWise]]
## Metadata
- Author: [[Christensen, Clayton M.
Dillon, Karen
Allworth, James]]
- Full Title: How Will You Measure Your Life?
- Category: #books

## Highlights
- Alongside these disappointments, there are many of my classmates who have led exemplary personal lives; they have truly been an inspiration to me.
- Understanding what causes the problems that trapped some of my classmates is important not just for those who have come off the path that they had planned to follow but for those whose lives are still on the right path—as well as those whose journeys are just beginning
- We all are vulnerable to the forces and decisions that have derailed too many.
- These theories are statements of what causes things to happen—and why.
- We then use the theories to predict what problems and opportunities are likely to occur in the future for that company, and we use the theories to predict what actions the managers will need to take to address them.
- We are there to explore not what we hope will happen to us but rather what the theories predict will happen to us, as a result of different decisions and actions
- write three simple questions beside those theories:
- How can I be sure that
- I will be successful and happy in my career?
  My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
  I live a life of integrity—and stay out of jail?
- These questions might sound simple, but they are questions that so many of my classmates never asked, or had asked but lost track of what they learned
- the three of us are united in the goal of helping you understand the theories we share in this book because we believe they can sharpen the acuity with which you can examine and improve your life.
- I don’t promise this book will offer you any easy answers: working through these questions requires hard work.
- It has taken me decades. But it has also been one of the most worthwhile endeavors of my life.
- Just Because You Have Feathers
- walk into the self-help section of any bookstore and you’ll be overwhelmed with scores of choices about how you can improve your life
- How do you know what is good advice—and what is bad
- The Difference Between What to Think and How to Think
- There are no easy answers to life’s challenges.
- s not a surprise that these answers are very appealing to some. They take hard problems—ones that people can go through an entire life without ever resolving—and offer a quick fix.
- There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life.
- The only thing I can do is to explain the theory first; then we can look at the company through the lens that the theory offers.
- I explained that disruption happens when a competitor enters a market with a low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior.
- I’ve thought about that exchange a million times since. If I had tried to tell Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, he would have eviscerated my argument
- But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.
- I Don’t Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion
- When people ask me something, I now rarely answer directly
- People, typically, then say, “Okay, I get it.” They’ll then answer their question with more insight than I could possibly have
- ll then explain how it applies to their question. To be sure they understand it, I’ll describe to them how the process in the model worked its way through an industry or situation different from their own, to help them visualize how it works
- He said that this was the first time he had convened all of his direct reports in one room.
- me. “You have no idea why we are interested in this, do you?”
- aloud, “Everything about the way we do our jobs is focused on the high end of the problem—what the USSR used to be.”
- On the surface, competition in the computer chip market and the proliferation of global terrorism could not seem like more different problems to tackle. But they are fundamentally the same problem, just in different contexts. Good theory can help us categorize, explain, and, most important, predict
- People 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
- You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood.
- while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job.
- This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it
- Early researchers observed strong correlations between being able to fly and having feathers and wings
- The mistake was that although feathers and wings were correlated with flying, the would-be aviators did not understand the fundamental causal mechanism—what actually causes something to happen—that enabled certain creatures to fly.
- Modern flight can be traced directly back to the development and adoption of this theory.
- The Power of Theory in Our Lives
- The appeal of easy answers—of strapping on wings and feathers—is incredibly alluring.
- But so much of what’s become popular thinking isn’t grounded in anything more than a series of anecdotes
- Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen
- Each chapter of this book highlights a theory as it might apply to a particular challenge. But just as was true in understanding flight, problems in our lives don’t always map neatly to theories on a one-to-one basis.
- These theories are powerful tools. I have applied many of them in my own life; others I wish I’d had available to me when I was younger, struggling with a problem.
- The theories in this book are based on a deep understanding of human endeavor—what causes what to happen, and why
- Finding Happiness in Your Career
- The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
- Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits.
- WHEN YOU WERE ten years old
- There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that’s truly meaningful to them. But 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.
- I want you to be able to experience that feeling—to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. Together, in the next chapters, we’re going to build a strategy for you to do exactly that.
- At a basic level, a strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there.
- You don’t need to think about this for more than a minute, however, before you realize that this same strategy-making process is at work in every one of us as well.
- But often what we actually end up doing is very different from what we set out to do.
## New highlights added March 9, 2022 at 9:52 PM
- To help you avoid this mistake, I want to discuss the best research we have on what truly motivates people.
- outline how best to balance our plans to find something that we truly love doing with the opportunities and challenges that we never expected to arise in our lives.
- The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it.
- 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.
- impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. 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
- It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. 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.