How Will You Measure Your Life

The title alone of the book “How Will you Measure your Life” by Clayton M. Christensen almost instantly provokes readers to reflect on those things that matter most in life, and indeed this is what the focus of the book is all about.  I’d like to discuss two of the main important points expressed in the book.

#1  “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

We must do what we love.  Too many of us are unfulfilled or unsatisfied in life because of the work we choose to do.  We tell ourselves to tough it out, it pays really well, my options are limited, or that we will stick with it only for a few more years and then we will move on to pursue our real passion.  The problem is time passes quickly and before we know it, our life feels empty and we are full of remorse because we did not pursue our dreams.  We can become distracted or enticed by many alluring things such as money, power, ease, or prestige and in the end, none of it will matter much if we have sacrificed things that deeply matter to us. The author believes all things are possible and that each one of us can find a way to make a living doing what we love.  It may not be easy to discover or handed to us on a plate, but if we continue to search we will one day find something worth working for—something satisfying and fulfilling to us.  Thus we shouldn’t settle on a job, but instead look for work and a career that is personally meaningful. 

#2 “How we allocate our own resources can make our life turn out to be exactly as we hope or very different from what we intend.” 

How we spend our resources demonstrates what is important to us.  Each of us has limited resources which includes such things as our time, talent, and money and how we allocated these resources demonstrates our priorities.  The author points out most of us say we value our families but many of us starve it of resources.  We spend our time and efforts away from home, often times at work for example, saying we are doing it for the good of our family yet all we end up doing is sacrificing our family for our job.  Our time and efforts need to be focused on what is most important to us.  The author also states that by looking at a man’s checkbook you can easily discover what matters to him.  (For me this statement made me look at my checkbook!)  We are given limited resources in life and we all need to evaluate how we are using them.  If they are not being put to good use, by being utilized toward those things that matter most to us then, we need to change and adjust.  Giving ample resources to things that matter most will give us great results in life.    

We all need to contemplate how we will measure our lives.  Will it be by the career we had, the money we earned, or the prestige we gained?  Or will it be by the relationships we formed, the people we helped, and the good things we have done?  The choice is ours—it is up to us.  Each of us one day will face the end of the road, so we must decide now how we want our life to look when it is over. 

To see how I rated this book click here