What I've Been Reading

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M Christensen. I have never read a book drawing such brilliant analogies between business and life - only Clayton is capable of pulling it off with subtlety. There is plenty to learn from this book, if one can get around the peppered religiosity.

• Instead of teaching what to think, teach how to think.
• 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 rear view mirror— because data is only available about the past.
• One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies— something that the theory cannot explain. Remember the story about birds, feathers, and flight? The early aviators might have seen some warning signs in their rudimentary analysis of flight had they examined what their beliefs or theories could not explain. Ostriches have wings and feathers but can’t fly. Bats have wings but no feathers, and they are great fliers. And flying squirrels have neither wings nor feathers … and they get by.
• True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.
• The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all.
• Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
• The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns— such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus— rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children.
• If the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.
• There is much more to life than your career. The person you are at work and the amount of time you spend there will impact the person you are outside of work with your family and close friends. In my experience, 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.
• Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment— but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.
• As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won’t work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don’t. If anything, it’s the opposite.
• Many products fail because companies develop them from the wrong perspective. Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve. The same is true in our relationships: we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.
• Many parents are making the same mistake, flooding their children with resources— knowledge, skills, and experiences. And just as with Dell, each of the decisions to do so seems to make sense. We want our kids to get ahead, and believe that the opportunities and experiences we have provided for them will help them do exactly that. But the nature of these activities— experiences in which they’re not deeply engaged and that don’t really challenge them to do hard things— denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they’ll need to succeed in the future.
• Children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them. First, when children are ready to learn, we need to be there. And second, we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.
• Creating experiences for your children doesn’t guarantee that they’ll learn what they need to learn. If that doesn’t happen, you have to figure out why that experience didn’t achieve it. You might have to iterate through different ideas until you get it right. The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life.
• Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
• I can’t anticipate all the circumstances and moral dilemmas you will find yourself in throughout your life. Yours will be different from everyone else’s. What I offer here is a theory called “full versus marginal thinking” that will help you answer our final question: how can I be sure I live a life of integrity?
• The type of person you want to become— what the purpose of your life is— is too important to leave to chance.
• The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.