Book Thoughts | How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon

”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. Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it’s a compromise that will always eat away at you. But you need not resign yourself to this fate.” from “How Will You Measure Your Life?”

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen

I will read this book again. And again.

I feel like I’ve been pretty good at choosing a life-work balance that aligns with my priorities. I chose a career that provides high satisfaction and daily challenge but also allows me to put the needs of my family first. Still, as I plowed through Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?” I found myself learning and considering and rethinking and evaluating and, eventually, realizing how fortunate (or maybe blessed?) I am to have fallen into my current career. Wittingly or not.

Still, there is more. As I read, I realized how young I am and how much more opportunity there is for growth, need to continue to recalibrate, to balance, to evaluate. It is so easy to lose sight of balance along the way as you climb the ladder of success, often to only find out that the ladder is against the wrong wall. So, I’ll read it again.

Here’s another great quote from the book on this point:

”The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In 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.”

Energy, my friends. You’ve got to devote energy to the strategy, to the goal, the thing…whatever it is. A great example of this is my better-half, Britt. I knew she liked to quilt when we married, but I didn’t realize she was an artist, too. Maybe that’s a distinction without a difference to you, but before I married I thought quilting was all squares and strings of yarn that the local Relief Society tied for newlyweds and disaster victims. I didn’t realize that it had its nuances and distinctions, disputes and styles, just as any other art, whether its oil on canvas, photography, clay, or performance (and just as expensive, too. Don’t ask me what we’re going to do with all the fabric accumulating in her sewing room, because I don’t know–and in the interest of marital bliss, I’m not going to ask. At least not seriously). And as an artist, it can consume and occupy large parts of Britt’s brain for huge chunks of time. You see, she decided long ago that she wanted to be a master quilter, an artist, to create and to make, and she puts a lot of energy into accomplishing that goal. The result? She’s been commissioned to create custom works of art, as well as has placed in national art competitions. She is making amazing progress in distinguishing herself as a creator and a master artist. She puts energy into her strategy, and she’s constantly thinking about how to improve. It is inspiring.

This kind of leads to another great quote that I love:

”How you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. 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.”

A great way to see how you’re implementing your strategy, and how much energy you’re putting into it, is an evaluation of where your resources are going. This isn’t just where you spend your money, though that’s a huge part of it, but how you spend your time. I think one way I see that manifest is in the kinds of things I see my children reflect from me. I learned early on in our family’s history that while each of the girls is their own individual, they are also incredibly absorbant of what they see and hear Britt and I do–they mirror us, sometimes in uncanny fashion. I recall a moment of personal reflection and self-assessment initiated when I heard my daughter talking to her sister across the house and, without citing me, say almost the exact same thing I had said a dozen times. (On a lighter note, I also observe that the girls are as into Star Wars as they are into their dolls…maybe more so. The Force is with us, and we are one with the Force.) As I’ve watched them grow, I’ve seen them adopt interests that they see us spend time doing, whether it is in the outdoors, certain athletics, television shows, books, and even our bad habits. I see myself putting energy into something, and it is reflected all around me, often in the things my family does and does not care about.

Clayton has something to say on this, too:

”High-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the most important parts of our life of the resources it needs to flourish.”

This is perhaps the most important part of what I took away from the book, though there are lessons throughout–nothing I do at work will matter if I don’t balance it with what I do at home. So, I try to balance it. I hope to balance it.

So, it’s a great book. And I’ll read it again.