How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen

We live in a very competitive world. Every day, we are surrounded by so many commitments that are competing for our time and attention all the time. Given the limited resources we have at our disposal(time, energy, focus), we often make trade-offs in allocating them to the ever competing demands. Although it doesn’t seem much, some trade-offs that we subconsciously make tend to have a severe effect on our lives much after they are made. If our life is a sum of our professional, personal and spiritual aspects, where should we spend our time on? How do we make the judicious use of our resources so that we live a life of contentment? Personally, I was a victim of such unfair resource allocation to my life aspects early in my career which I realized only after having deep conversations with my friends and relatives.

I read a lot of books on how we can live a life of contentment and they all gave some really good advice. All the books I read so far approached this subject from a personal perspective - things you would have to start practising by following principles established by our scriptures and epics. However, this book - How You Will Measure Your Life - takes a very different approach. This book is written by Clayton Christensen(author of The Innovators Dilemma), a professor at Harvard Business School. When a business professor talks about life lessons, the influence of business is evident in his writings. In this particular book, he makes business the reference point to drive home the life lessons. What does it contain? Read on.

Clayton divides the book into three parts - career, personal life and integrity. For most of us, these three pillars cover pretty much all aspects of life. The end goal of all these topics is to live a life of contentment and joy. The USP of this book is to blend the well proven theories in the business work in our lives.

In the career part, Clayton advises on how to make the best out of our jobs - starting from making the right choice to selecting one to all the way to thriving in one that we chose.He talks about deliberate strategy versus emergent strategy and also the unexpected opportunities that life throws at us. He also talks about not just formulating a strategy but also ways to implement it to see the fruits it bears.

On personal side, Clayton shares valuable lessons for various aspects of our daily lives such as relationships with our friends and spouse, kids - spending time with them and nurturing them. He shares theories to shape the thinking of kids and prepare them for the challenges that life presents them. He also talks about the most important thing at work and our family - culture. He talks in detail on how culture is shaped at work place and how it can be cultivated at home by providing detailed steps on building it.

As the book comes to end, he talks about integrity - specifically how to stay out of jail. This may seem a bit overboard but it’s an extreme to capture the verious aspects of our life that deal with integrity. He talks about marginal thinking theory and explains the pitfalls that come along with it in our daily lives. At the end, he presents us with a framework on how do we want to measure of our life. He wants us to think for ourselves on what we want to become in our lives and how do we strive to fulfil that dream.

Overall, this book is a great combination of business and life that offers a very practical advice and some strong theories to support that advice. Happy reading!