How Will You Measure Your Life?

Key Concepts

We can make bad decisions when we don’t focus on what really drives happiness 

“The starting point for our journey is a discussion of priorities. These are, in effect, your core decision-making criteria: what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we don’t notice that gap until it’s too late.” (p. 23)

“Interestingly, Herzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator.” (p. 33)

“The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.” (p. 33)

“Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (p. 34)”

Deliberate versus Emergent strategies

“In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.” (p. 48)

“If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense.” (p. 48)

“But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent.” (p. 48)

We can also make mistakes because short-term rewards claim our attention rather than long-term rewards

“In fact, if you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification over endeavors that result in long-term success.” (p. 68)

“The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers, as this domain of their life provides the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward.” (p. 72)

“The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. ‘I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …’” (p. 73)

Investments in your kids need to be made early; there’s no skipping out on the early years

“It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.” (p. 90)

“One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, ‘I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.’” (p. 94)

Resources, Processes, and Priorities, applied to child-rearing

“The Resources, Processes, and Priorities model of capabilities can help us gauge what our children will need to be able to do, given the types of challenges and problems that we know they will confront in their future.” (p. 129)

“Processes are what your child does with the resources he has, to accomplish and create new things for himself. Just as within a business, they are relatively intangible, but are a large part of what makes each child unique. These include the way he thinks, how he asks insightful questions, how and whether he can solve problems of various types, how he works with others, and so on.” (p. 129)

“Priorities determine how a child will make decisions in his life—which things in his mind and life he will put to the top of the list, which he will procrastinate doing, and which he will have no interest in doing at all.” (p. 130)

“Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.” (p. 130)

“Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart.” (p. 155)

Proactively developing a family culture helps steer kids in the right direction

One of the most powerful tools to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. (p. 158)

You can tell the health of a company’s culture by asking, “When faced with a choice on how to do something, did employees make the decision that the culture ‘wanted’ them to make? And was the feedback they received consistent with that?” (p. 165)

If you want your family to have a culture with a clear set of priorities for everyone to follow, then those priorities need to be proactively designed into the culture—which can be built through the steps noted above. (p. 166)

Quotables

“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.” —Steve Jobs (p. 19)

“I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.” (p. 39)

“Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: ‘What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?’ List them. Are they within your control?” (p. 57)

“Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing? What evidence do you have?” (p. 58)

“Whenever it is that you’re dealing with other human beings, it’s not always possible to control how things turn out; nowhere is this more true than with children. Even if you’re armed with an abundance of love and good intentions, it’s a complicated world: kids have unprecedented access to ideas from everywhere—their friends, the media, the Internet. The most determined parent will still find that it is almost impossible to control all these influences. On top of that, each child is wired differently. We rarely have children who are exactly like us—or like each other—something that often comes as a surprise to new parents.” (p. 82)

“If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous. In fact, it is here that this theory yields the most insight, simply because one of the most important jobs you’ll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse. Getting this right, I believe, is critical to sustaining a happy marriage.” (p. 112)

“The end result of these good intentions for our children is that too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others.” (p. 133)

“As Henry Ford once put it, ‘If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.’ Thinking on a marginal basis can be very, very dangerous.” (p. 185)

“But looking back on it, I realize that resisting the temptation of ‘in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay’ has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. (p. 190)”