How Will You Measure Your Life? Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

The key to happiness is not necessarily achieving business success, but maintaining a good work-life balance and cultivating strong personal relationships. Applying the same theories that allow people to be successful in business will also help people be successful in their personal lives. They must have a clearly defined strategy for success, pursue careers that motivate and interest them, and invest their resources equally in personal and professional goals. Individuals should invest just as much time in developing a strong relationship with their spouse, educating their children, and creating a culture of strong family values as they do pursue their career goals. Individuals must always act with integrity and never compromise on their values.

About the Author

James Allworth is the head of innovation for Cloudflare, an advisor to Peloton Technology, and the host of the Exponent podcast. His previous writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Reuters. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Karen Dillon is an author, journalist, and keynote speaker. She is the contributing editor to the Harvard Business Review and serves as the editorial director of BanyanGlobal Family Business Advisors. Formerly, she served as the deputy editor of Inc magazine and was the editor and publisher of American Lawyer and Legal Business. She holds a degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Clayton M. Christensen was an academic, business consultant, and author. He co-founded the venture capital firm Rose Park Advisors, and the management consulting firm Innosight. He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and was a former Rhodes Scholar.

Topics

How Will You Measure Your Life? Book Summary Preview

What You’ll Learn

Why incentives like more money or a more prestigious title are not the keys to happiness and job satisfaction
How to use both deliberate and emergent strategies to capitalize on all possible opportunities
Why investing in strong relationships is the key to long-term happiness

Who Is This For

Individuals hoping to find a career where they will be challenged, motivated, and satisfied in the long term
People who wish to cultivate and nurture stronger, more rewarding personal relationships
Individuals striving to achieve happiness through a healthy balance of personal and professional accomplishments

Key Insights

Many people assume that when they achieve professional success and have high-profile careers, they will finally be happy. However, lots of people are professionally successful, but still unhappy in their personal lives and struggling with their relationships. Some go through divorces, aren’t close with their children, and some even end up in prison. This is because they do not apply the same theories that enabled them to be successful in business to their personal lives.

Like businesses, individuals must have a clearly defined strategy for success, and be able to capitalize on opportunities as they arise. In order to develop a successful strategy, individuals should embrace self-awareness, and ask themselves what really interests and motivates them. External incentives, such as a high salary, are often not enough to make a job satisfying in the long-term. To be happy, people must also strive for a good work-life balance. Rather than investing all their time and resources in their career, they should take the time to invest in building strong personal relationships, being a good spouse, raising their children well, and cultivating a strong sense of family values. These long-term goals will be much more rewarding and impactful in the future than short-term goals, such as completing a work project or getting a bonus. Additionally, individuals must never compromise on their integrity. One must always make moral decisions, and never fall into the trap of allowing an unethical action to slide “just this once.”

Motivation Is More Important Than Money

Most people believe that things like a better salary or more prestige at work would make them happier. These beliefs are so commonplace that they have a name: the incentive theory. This theory was made popular by the economist Michael Jensen and management theorist William Meckling, and it states simply that the more money and respect - that is, external incentives - people receive at work, the better their performance will be. However, these kinds of incentives are not actually the key to happiness, and this theory has proven to be far too simplistic to hold up in real life.

It is true, however, that many people who have achieved professional success will still wind up unhappy in their personal life, struggling with their businesses, or even find themselves caught up in criminal behavior. So clearly professional incentives are not the solution to everything. In fact, studies have shown that the employees that work the hardest are not the highest-paid business executives,...