How Will You Measure Your Life: Gayatri Aryan Shares Thoughtful Review in our Mother Daughter Book Review Series
Book Title: How Will You Measure Your Life
Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon
Genre: Self Help > Personal Development, Psychology, Leadership, Philosophy
Publication Date: May 2012
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“It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
Some books give you goosebumps, “How Will You Measure Your Life” is one of those books for me. However, before I tell you about the book, let me share a few words about Professor Christensen. To me, he was the personification of the term “ larger than life”, not in any exaggerated or flamboyant way. Au contraire, in the most purposeful way.
I have had the privilege to listen to his favorite anecdote explaining the idea of marginal thinking. It’s a story from his days as a student at Oxford. Professor Christensen played basketball for the university team, and they made it to the national finals – whereupon it emerged the big game would be on a Sunday. For a devout Mormon Professor Christensen was, playing on the Sabbath was against his principles. The team coach asked him to break his rule, just this once. One can only imagine the pressure. The marginal cost of breaking his rule "just this once" was minor, while the upfront loss of skipping the final was huge. After some reflection, Professor Christensen concluded that he would not play in the finals because he did not want to violate his personal rules: “Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances warranting ‘just this once’ exceptions.”
With such rooted principles, Professor Christensen drew upon his learnings from the business world in this book to offer some guidelines for finding meaning in life. Section I speaks to finding happiness in a career, warning us of the trap of allocating time to whoever screams the loudest and talent to whatever offers the fastest reward. Professor Christensen advises us to balance deliberate and emergent strategy noting that the danger of high achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
Section II offers incredible insights into finding happiness in relationships. Feels like a moonshot, doesn't it! Sharing a powerful snippet here: “...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.” I know I’m that person, relinquishing exercise/self-care to yet another work call. The examples are endless. Such are the fallacies of our busy modern lives.
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This is my second review of a decade old book. Ha! Maybe that’s starting to tell my age :). Leaving jokes aside, Professor Christensen has left an incredibly insightful perspective to help us derive the most meaning from this thing we call “life”. He has offered a strong reminder that every decision, every small choice matters even while some repercussions emerge much later.
I like to end my review by indicating the target audience for this book: every adult, every five years