You end up paying the full price anyways.
How Will You Measure Your Life? AtomicIdeas from the book
Why do people with remarkable professional achievements feel unhappy, end up with failed relationships and/or get embroiled in scandals or crime? How can we live our life fully and know we’re on the right track?
Of all the work that has been done in this space, (Late) Prof Clayton Christensen’s work stands out - mainly because he walked the talk and stayed away from theoretical wisdom. Instead, he brings the notion that there is a lot of similarity between running a company and living a good life - the most important trait being learning to allocate your resources.
In business and life, we tend to allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
Sharing AtomicIdeas from his book ‘How will you measure your life?’, a highly recommended book that just asks you the most important question - how will you measure your life? What are your priorities? Are you aligning your life towards that?
Do Not Over Invest In Work, And Under Invest In Relationships
You Have to Tend to Your Relationships
To have good relationships with people, you need to put an effort. They require constant attention, and are easily breakable, even if it comes to our closest family.
“In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”
So, do not forget to set some time apart to spend with your family.
Your work may give you instant gratification, but it is of no worth when you have no one to spend the money you earn with.
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Failure Is Progress
Getting something wrong doesn’t mean you failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.
In many lines of work having early success is widely publicized and celebrated, and it often creates a myth that early success means consistent and permanent success, when in reality the path to success is often indirect and rife with failure.
Always Stick To Your Principles
It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.
A voice in our head says, ‘Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay.’ And the voice in our head seems to be right; the price of doing something wrong ‘just this once’ usually appears alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t see where that path is ultimately headed or the full cost that the choice entails.
Recent years have offered plenty of examples of people (the startup ecosystem is full of such stories, globally) who were extremely well-respected by their colleagues and peers falling from grace because they made this mistake: Prof Clayton
The marginal cost of doing something 'just this once' may appear insignificant, but the overall cost is usually much greater.
We End Up Paying The Full Price Anyway
We end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not
Consider How You’re Allocating Resources
How you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road.
Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of every day decisions about where we spend our resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction?
Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.
Slightly longish, but do read this 👇
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.
I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people who have a high need for achievement–and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates–have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers–even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
Have a great life!
-ashish.
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