How will you measure your life?

We want fulfillment in our career and relationships and Clayton Christensen has some excellent inspiration and wisdom to share.

What drew Christensen to write this book was repeatedly seeing a pattern among some of the brightest MBA graduates struggle with fulfillment in their careers and relationships despite their best intentions. Christensen provides incredible insights from his business research and engagements into a series of determining questions: How can I be sure that I’ll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity and stay out of jail?

What I learned about career from Christensen:

1. Fulfillment in our jobs and careers comes from two types of factors — hygiene factors and motivator factors.

Hygiene factors such as a safe working environment, good managers, fair compensation are necessary not to hate our jobs. But beyond a certain point, hygiene factors are not what keeps us at a job.

Motivator factors that are more personal, such as purpose and recognition in our work, opportunities for learning, growth and responsibilities, are what keep us at a job and a career path for years.

Hygiene factors matter first, but motivator factors matter the most. Once our hygiene factors are satisfied at work, optimizing for motivator factors will give us more fulfillment.

2. We can navigate our careers better with an emergent strategy than a deliberate strategy in our early years or even decades. Emergent strategy keeps us open to opportunities, pivots and adjustments till we find something that satisfies our hygiene factors and gives us all our motivators. A deliberate strategy works best only when we are dead sure of the goal; otherwise it can lead us on a long path of suffering while ignoring the more fulfilling options and opportunities to pivot.

3. A strategy is nothing but good intentions unless we implement it. We can check our alignment to a strategy by looking at our resource allocation, whether in our career or the person we want to become.

What stays with me about relationships from the book:

1. The metaphor of ‘Jobs to be done’: do we understand what jobs we are being hired for in our professional and personal relationships? Remember that adults in the morning hired a milkshake sold by a food chain to make their long drive to work less boring, whereas parents hired the milkshake in the afternoon to make them feel good about letting their kids enjoy something (a milkshake!) without significant side-effects. We can become better milkshakes in our relationships when we understand our jobs.
2. Culture is how everyone in a group makes day-to-day decisions involving processes and priorities without explicitly discussing those decisions with everyone. It develops over time and can be created consciously, not only in companies but in families.

Lastly, what I learned about integrity:

1. It is easier to follow our principles 100 percent of the time than 98 percent of the time.

Overall, Christensen and the team do a fabulous job of keeping the book real and relevant by explaining their insights through frameworks and practical examples. Don’t judge the book by its title; it weighs more than a feel-good and preachy self-help book.