Clayton M. Christensen article on personal success

Clayton M. Christensen wrote in Harvard Business Review about allocating personal time, energy, and talent to ultimately shape your life's strategy. He asks his students use management theories to find answers to three important questions of life: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Here are some highlights. The full article is a must read. Access to the article is free for the month of August.

1. Know your purpose: Christensen promises his students that if they figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at Harvard Business School. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity of purpose trumps many any other kinds of knowledge.

2. Allocate resources: Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

3. Build a culture: There comes a point when parents wish that they had begun working at a very young age to build a culture at home in which their children instinctively behave respectfully and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do.

4. Avoid the marginal costs mistake: It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

5. Remember Humility: If your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.

Quoting from the conclusion:

The metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched. I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Christensen is an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Read more on Success by Bessie Anderson Stanley of Lincoln, Kansas

Best,

Chuck