Excerpt from "How Will You Measure Your Life"

I love this!!! This is a Harvard Business Review Article that has inspired me in many, many ways! A lot of thoughts come to mind, but I'll save those for later. What's your take?

To view the full article: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. 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 about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.

The Beginning

I am tired of facebook . . . will I still use it? Yes. Is it effective to establish a large 'breadth' of friends and stay in contact with them? Yes. It serves a good purpose. But, I think facebook kinda falls inline with what it is that I am trying to avoid and that is the state of always being connected. Yes, the world toutes the state of technology and the ability that we have to remain connected at all times. I think I have seen myself and others at times lose site or lose "connection" with who they really are and what they want from life from being so connected socially and/or feeling that they need to be doing something with someone at every moment of every day or have plans every night. I've been there and after a while it sucks! You see the same people night after night and facebook pic after facebook pic doing the same stuff. You'll see them at a party and they give the cordial greeting and then back the grind of . . . of . . . nothing. everybody goes home, gets texts about other things that are going on tomorrow and its back to the same old same old. We try to 'trace' normalcy by being fun and outgoing and connected, when in reality, this life style is very abnormal and at times, desensitizing. In a young single adult atmosphere, yes that is essentially what I write about being I am in it, I write about this specifically because most everyone in this demographic are doing very important things for their future. School, work/career, having fun/partying. All very important things. But, one thing unifies all of those things and it's "I" or "Me". They are solely based around you and your timetable. I speak very generally of course, but I see a lot growing up in people btwn the ages of 18 - 23, but lately I've seen a lot of "growing down" of people in their mid to late twenties. Why is that? We all know what we need to do to be happy and what creates lasting happiness. I just wish I saw more of it. I wish I saw more people living what they know. Yes, many of these observations are very limited in their nature, but let's all be honest, we all know exactly what I'm talking about. Party after party, text after text, facebook invite after facebook invite, looking at other people's facebooks for . . . oops, hours! and you leave all of those things thinking, that was fun, he or she is so hot, or looking for a reason to leave or bail to go to a better party. And then when you are at home on your bed, all alone, you see yourself, but no, hold on, you REALLY see yourself. You see that you aren't REALLY happy. You aren't any closer to where you want to be then before, if anything, you're more desensitized. At that moment you think, maybe I should change things up. Maybe I should follow this feeling I have to be more polite, respectful, dedicated, sweet, sincere, serving? Maybe I should pray more, read more, make me a better me more. Maybe I should date more? Maybe I should stop toying with people's feelings? Maybe I should step up and be more res . . .

*** BEEP BEEP BEEP ***

FWD: Pool party tomorrow night at Jon's house. Good food, loud music, and hot people! See you there!

. . . I'll figure it out later.