I typically don’t expect to find food for my soul in the Harvard Business Review. So you can imagine my surprise to discover the article entitled How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen.
As the executive summary states:
“Harvard Business School’s Christensen teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes that these models can help people lead better lives. In this article, he explains how, exploring questions everyone needs to ask: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity?”
In the article Christensen talks of the importance of having a clear purpose. At Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar in the midst of a very demanding academic program, he made a life altering decision:
“I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.”
“Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned.”
If you are a leader or manager you are accustomed to looking for measurable ways to evaluate the success an enterprise or project. But how often do we apply the same principles to our lives? When you come to the end of your life, how will you determine whether it was successful? Surely, upon reflection, the standard must be more significant than the stuff we have acquired. I suggest that if you take some time to sit down and evaluate the outcomes you will want at the end of your life, you will discover the most important things are the relationships you have developed, the kind of person you have become, and the difference you make for good in the world – a difference greater than for some personal or corporate bottom line.
Of course, many of you have done this. You have taken stock of your life and decided what is really going to matter.
But if you have not, the question remains.
How will you measure your life?
