Book SummaryHow Will You Measure Your Life?, by Clayton M. Christensen

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of How Will You Measure Your Life?

In How Will You Measure Your Life? business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen shows how economic theories that help businesses succeed can also help individuals make better life decisions. He presents theories and business case studies that show you pitfalls to avoid, and also how to be happy and successful in your career and personal life.

Typical self-help books on how to succeed and be happy are based mostly on anecdotes and on routines that worked for the authors, but that may or may not work for you. In contrast, we know theories work: They’re tested, proven, and can be universally applied. A theory is a statement of cause and effect. Economic theories show the impact on a business of doing certain things; they predict what will happen in the future and what steps managers might take. They can do the same for your personal life.

Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, uses business theories to explain:

• How to be successful and happy in your career
• How to build relationships with your partner, children, other family members, and close friends that are a lifelong source of happiness
• How to live with integrity

(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Innovator’s Dilemma here.)

Christensen began exploring these questions after finding that many of his former Harvard Business School classmates had struggled in their personal lives and often didn’t enjoy their work, despite significant professional accomplishments. One, Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, ended up in jail.

Christensen wrote this book to help define a path to both professional and personal success. It’s intended to help you find fulfillment by understanding what’s most important to you, and ultimately answering the question of how you’ll measure your life.

Applying Theories to Life

Making good decisions in business and life requires understanding what actions cause what outcomes. The business theories explained in this book will help you see cause and effect. Each chapter highlights a business theory and applies it to a personal challenge.

Operating without a theory is like navigating at sea without directional instruments—you’re relying on the currents (outside forces) and chance. However, good theories point you in the direction of good decisions. From there, it’s up to you. Theories tell you how to think about key decisions, not what to think.

Finding Happiness in Your Career

A key decision in life is choosing your job or career, but many people choose them for the wrong reasons. They end up unhappy and resigned to the belief that doing what you love isn’t a realistic option. But you don’t have to settle—the key to finding happiness in your career is creating a strategy for where you want to go and how to get there. A successful strategy involves three components:

• Determining priorities based on what truly motivates you
• Balancing plans with opportunities and challenges
• Allocating your resources

Understand What Motivates You

When you feel unhappy and stuck in your career or life, it’s usually because what you’re doing isn’t what really motivates you. Many people think incentives are the key to being satisfied at work, and they opt for jobs on the basis of the incentives they offer. But incentives don’t make people happy in their jobs.

Theory of motivation: Incentives (also known as hygiene factors), like compensation, job security, status, work environment, manager practices, and company policies, will leave you dissatisfied with your job if they’re not adequately addressed. But improved hygiene factors won’t make you happy (just less dissatisfied). What makes you happy are motivators, such as challenging work, responsibility, learning, the chance to grow, and the chance to make a meaningful contribution. Motivating factors are mostly inherent in the work itself and in the person doing it, rather than external like hygiene factors.

Application: When seeking a job or career that will make you happy, look beyond whether a job meets basic hygiene factors and ask whether it meets motivational criteria. For instance, ask yourself:

• Do I find this work meaningful?
• Will I be able to learn and grow?
• What are the opportunities to achieve and be recognized?
• What kind of responsibility will I have?

Focus on the factors that really matter to you—those that make you love coming to work each day—and the hygiene factors, after a certain point, will take care of themselves.

Balance Plans With Opportunities

After you understand what motivates you, the second strategy piece is balancing your plans with unexpected opportunities that come up. Both companies and individuals must know how to do this in order to thrive.

Theory: Once formulated, every strategy continues to evolve in response to options that develop. There are two types of options:

1) Anticipated opportunities: These are opportunities you identify and choose to pursue as a deliberate strategy.

2) Unanticipated opportunities: These are a combination of problems and opportunities you run into while implementing your deliberate plan. When these unexpected things come up, you must decide whether to stick with the plan, adjust it, or replace it with one of the new options. You may make an outright decision, or an implicit one in which the cumulative impact of daily decisions evolves your strategy. A strategy that evolves this way is an emergent strategy.

Application: To decide when to pursue an option or to stay the course with your deliberate strategy, ask yourself: What assumptions have to be correct for this course of action to succeed? (Often plans are based on assumptions that are incorrect.) Specifically, when considering a job, ask yourself:

• Why do you think you’d enjoy this job and how do you know this?
• What would others have to do for you...

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Introduction

In How Will You Measure Your Life? business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen shows how economic theories that help businesses succeed can also help individuals make better life decisions. He presents theories and business case studies that show you pitfalls to avoid, and also how to be happy and successful in your career and personal life.

Typical self-help books on how to succeed and be happy are based mostly on anecdotes and on routines that worked for the authors, but that may or may not work for you.

In contrast, we know theories work: They’re tested, proven, and can be universally applied. A theory is a statement of cause and effect. Economic theories show the impact on a business of doing certain things; they predict what will happen in the future and what steps managers might take. They can do the same for your personal life.

Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, developed this book from a Harvard class exercise, in which he discusses how the business theories presented in the class also apply to personal life choices and questions, including:

• How to be successful and happy in your career
• How to build relationships with your...

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Part 1 | Chapter 1: Finding Happiness in Your Career

We all have ideas as kids about what will make us happy in life, but our dreams give way to compromises when we become adults. As a result, many people pick jobs and careers for the wrong reasons. As time goes on, you settle for what you have, accepting that doing what you love isn’t a realistic option.

But you don’t have to settle—the key to finding happiness in your career is creating a strategy for where you want to go and how to get there. The next few chapters focus on how to build such a strategy.

Start With a Strategy

In business and life, several steps create a strategy:

• Determining priorities
• Balancing plans with opportunities and challenges
• Allocating your resources

Your strategy is continuously evolving: As it takes shape, new information, problems, and opportunities come up that you need to incorporate. When you proactively manage this strategy process, you have a good chance of building a career you love. Here’s a closer look at this process:

Priorities: The starting point is setting priorities—identifying the factors or criteria most important to you in a career. This requires understanding motivational theory and how it applies to...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Your Job

People choose jobs based on 1) hygiene factors (money, status, perks, security, working conditions), or 2) motivating factors such as having challenging work, responsibility, learning, the chance to grow, and the chance to make a meaningful contribution. The motivators rather than hygiene factors are what make you happy.

What factors made you choose your current job? Which were hygiene factors (money, perks, security, working conditions) and which were true motivators? Which were most important in your decision?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 2: Balance Planning With Opportunity

Understanding what motivates you is the first piece of a strategy for career happiness. The second is balancing your plans with unexpected opportunities that come up. Both companies and individuals must know how to do this in order to thrive.

The Theory of Emergent Opportunities

Once formulated, every strategy continues to evolve in response to options that develop. There are two types of options:

1) Anticipated opportunities: These are opportunities you identify and choose to pursue. When you create a plan based on opportunities you see, you’re pursuing a deliberate strategy.

2) Unanticipated opportunities: These are a combination of problems and opportunities you run into while implementing your deliberate plan. They essentially compete for resources (money, time, attention) with your deliberate plan. When these unexpected things come up, you must decide whether to stick with the plan, adjust it, or replace it with one of the new options. You may make an outright decision, or an implicit one in which the cumulative impact of daily decisions evolves your strategy. A strategy that evolves this way is called an emergent strategy.

A strategy isn’t static—it...

Shortform Exercise: What Are Your Assumptions?

People often commit to a job or career path before realizing it’s not working out. To avoid this, before accepting a job, question your assumptions about the job. Ask yourself which assumptions have to be right for you to be happy in the job.

When you accepted your current job, what were your assumptions about it?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 3: Align Resources With Priorities

You can have a life strategy, understand your priorities and what motivates you, and adjust your plans for unexpected opportunities. But your stated strategy isn’t the one shaping your life unless it’s where you’re putting your resources—your energy, time, and money.

Resource allocation is the third component of your strategy: Where you spend your resources, intentionally or unintentionally, is your real strategy. It’s the accumulation of your daily decisions and actions. Follow the flow of your resources to determine whether you’re on track for where you say you want to go.

The Problem of Misaligned Resources

Keeping resources in alignment with strategy is a challenge for companies as well as individuals. There are many ways an unintended strategy can take over in a company, including:

1) Companies undermine their own strategy by incentivizing the wrong employee behaviors.

• Example: Sonosite, a company that made ultrasound machines, sold two models: a larger, more expensive one and a small, cheaper handheld one. Although the small one had greater market potential and the company wanted to boost its sales, they found that salespeople were pushing only...

Shortform Exercise: Track Your Resources

Where you apply your resources (time, talent, energy, money), intentionally or unintentionally, is your real strategy. It’s the accumulation of your daily decisions and actions. Follow the flow of your resources to determine whether you’re on track for where you say you want to go.

List the main things or pursuits in your life that compete for your attention and resources. What percentage of your time and money do you allocate to each in a given day or week?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Part 2 | Chapter 4: Finding Happiness in Your Relationships

The chapters in this section of the book show how personal relationship challenges are similar to the problems many businesses face. The same theories that apply to businesses can help you strengthen and nurture your relationships, whether you want to be a better spouse, parent, or friend.

Invest in Your Relationships

As we discussed in Chapter 3, many people over-invest in their careers at the expense of their families and relationships.

However, your career, by itself, won’t bring you happiness and fulfillment. Your career priorities are just part of a larger set of priorities, including your spouse, children, friends, faith, health, and so on. Work can be rewarding, but it doesn’t compare to the deep happiness you experience in relationships.

Like your career, your relationships need consistent attention. But two things work against this:

• You’re tempted to invest your resources where you see an immediate payoff; careers provide immediate rewards, while the payoff from investing in your relationships doesn’t show up until later.
• You pay less attention to friends and family because they’re less demanding than your boss. Because they love you and know...

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 5: Determine the Job to Be Done

Products often fail because companies develop them based on what they want to sell rather than on what customers need. They make something people don’t want or can’t use.

We often treat our relationships the same way misguided companies try to sell products—we focus on what’s important to us rather than what the other person wants. Changing your perspective can change your relationships.

The ‘Jobs to Be Done’ Theory

In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen introduced a new theory of marketing and product development: determining the “job to be done.” The idea is that when people buy a product or service, they’re in effect hiring it to do a job for them. Products designed to do jobs customers want done are most successful.

(Shortform note: For more on the jobs-to-be-done theory, read our summary of The Innovator’s Dilemma here.)

Marketing efforts often focus on targeting products to demographic segments, but we don’t buy things because of our demographics, although demographics may correlate with some buying decisions. What happens is that a job or need comes up, and we look for a way to...

Shortform Exercise: What Are Your Partner’s ‘Jobs to Be Done’

Applying the jobs-to-be-done theory in your relationship means figuring out what “jobs” your partner needs you to do (not assuming you know what the other person wants and needs), then doing those things as well as you can.

Describe a time when you did something for your partner and they didn’t seem to appreciate it. How did you react and why?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 6: Develop Your Children’s Capabilities

In recent years, many industries have outsourced certain functions and processes, including the pharmaceutical, auto, oil, information technology, and semiconductor industries. Investors, consultants, and academics have encouraged this as a way of increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Similarly, parents have outsourced certain family functions to coaches, teachers, and other adults.

While outsourcing can be a benefit, it can also undermine companies and families when decision-makers delegate the wrong things. The way to determine what the wrong things are is to understand and apply the theory of capabilities.

The Theory of Capabilities

Before outsourcing anything, companies need to fully understand their capabilities, especially which capabilities are critical to the company’s future. Capabilities derive from three factors:

1) Resources: These include people, technology, equipment, brands, designs, information, money, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Resources are usually visible and measurable. Employees create value for companies when they convert resources into products and services.

2) Processes: These are the ways...

Shortform Exercise: Build Your Children's Capabilities

Parents need to ensure that the experiences they provide challenge children to take responsibility, do difficult things, and create or invent things. These help children develop processes they’ll need in the future.

List the two to three most important experiences/activities you are providing to your children (for example, music lessons, church activities, chores, or sports). Why did you choose these activities?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 7: Learn From Experience

When businesses hire people, especially for key positions, they often prioritize talent: They look for people with the “right stuff.” But when people succeed, it isn’t because of innate talent, but because they learned to handle pressure and setbacks through experience. Employers make better hires when they look for the right experiences rather than promotions and awards.

This “schools of experience” theory of hiring can guide your career, and also help you prepare your children for success. The key is to seek out jobs that provide key experiences relevant to the job you ultimately want. Similarly, in your family, create experiences for your children that build key skills.

A Theory for Hiring

In the 1979 book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe described the competitive world of test pilots, where those who were chosen had a unique combination of talent and fearlessness: the “right stuff.” NASA adopted the formula for choosing the first astronauts.

Similarly, many companies look for the right stuff, or innate talent, in hiring key executives. They look for candidates...

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Chapter 8: Create a Family Culture

Both businesses and families have cultures that guide their members in making decisions in line with established priorities when bosses or parents aren’t around to provide direction. This chapter examines how cultures work and how to create a family culture.

Forming a Company Culture

People often think that perks and policies, such as casual dress, free food, company T-shirts, and bringing kids or dogs to work, define a company’s culture. While these may reflect office culture, a culture itself is less visible.

Organizational expert Edgar Schein of MIT defined culture as an ingrained way that employees go about their work—it’s a sense of the way a company does things, which becomes so automatic that people don’t think of doing things any other way. This sense develops over time from working together and seeing what works (the first time something works, others repeat the process and it becomes the way to do it). Together, employees reach an understanding of the company’s priorities and the processes for implementing them.

Managers don’t need to supervise everything because the organization essentially runs on its own. People instinctively do things in the prescribed...

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Part 3 | Chapter 9: Living With Integrity

Most people believe they’re ethical, and they can easily identify right and wrong. But integrity depends on small everyday decisions made over time, rather than one big decision where there’s a red flag.

Many people start down a slippery slope by engaging in marginal thinking, which is thinking that focuses on the short-term cost or benefit but fails to grasp the full impact of an action. They make small, seemingly harmless decisions or compromises that lead to more and bigger compromises—with devastating consequences, from business failures to jail terms.

The key to making ethical decisions is to recognize and avoid marginal thinking in your professional and personal life. This section examines the theory of marginal versus full thinking, how to avoid marginal thinking, and therefore, how to live a life of integrity.

The Theory of Marginal Versus Full Thinking

Businesses decide whether to invest in something by determining the marginal costs and benefits, or revenue. Marginal costs are additional or new costs compared to a company’s fixed costs, such as buildings and equipment. In economic terms, the marginal cost is the cost of producing one additional unit of...

Shortform Exercise: Rethink Marginal Thinking

Many people start down a slippery slope by engaging in marginal thinking that fails to grasp the full impact of their actions. They make small, seemingly harmless decisions or compromises that lead to more and bigger compromises—with devastating consequences.

Describe an instance where you applied marginal thinking at work or at home (that is, you decided to do something morally questionable “just this once”—for example, “fudging” on your expense report or taking a shortcut on a task). Afterward, how did you feel about your decision?

How Will You Measure Your Life? Summary Epilogue

The theories in this book won’t be of any use to you unless you have a purpose, or an understanding of what you’re trying to achieve in your life. For the theories to help you make decisions by predicting outcomes, you need a basis for weighing potential outcomes.

For a business, having a clear purpose drives executive decisions and keeps employees focused on what's important to the company. Similarly, you need a purpose for your life, against which to weigh decisions.

A company’s purpose provides three things:

1) A model or picture of what the company will look like or be when it has achieved its goals

2) The full commitment of executives and employees to the model they’re trying to create (no one compromises on it under any circumstances)

3) Several metrics the company’s leaders and employees can use to measure progress...

Shortform Exercise: What’s Your Purpose?

For a business, having a clear purpose drives decisions and keeps people focused on what's important to the company. Similarly, you need a purpose for your life, against which to weigh decisions. The three components of a purpose are: a model for who you want to be, commitment to that goal or value, and a metric by which you’ll measure your life.

Write out a statement describing the kind of person you want to be and what you want to achieve in your life.