Create a Strategy for Your Life
Keep the
purpose of your
life front and centre as you decide how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
Without a purpose, life can become hollow.
Allocate Your Resources
Your decisions about allocating your personal
time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy. Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. Troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.
Create a Culture
If ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture.
Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems.
Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake
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. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of
“just this once.”
Remember the Importance of Humility
One characteristic of these
humble people stood out: They had a
high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.
Choose the Right Yardstick
I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the
individuals you have helped become better people. 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.
Clayton M. Christensen - speaking to the students of the Harvard Business School. July 2010
http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1
