41 Profound Quotes from How Will you measure your life by Clayton M. Christensen

It’s hard to understand why How will you measure your life  is not on Amazon’s bestsellers list and has thousands of reviews. It’s one of the best books I have ever read, though it aims to solve the same problems that other self-help books do but it does it in a very effective way.Written in a clear language, with no unnecessary repetition, the advice in the book is new and original. Believe me, I read a lot of books so I can tell when a book is great. It’s a life changing book that has changed the way how I think and plan for my future. Thank you Mr. Christensen.

This book will make you think what is important in your life and help you manifest that. Isn’t it great?

Here are the quotes that I love.

''For many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it’s a compromise that will always eat away at you.But you need not resign yourself to this fate.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. 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.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''So, what are the things that will truly, deeply satisfy us, the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Hopefully, you’ve had experiences in your life that have satisfied Herzberg’s motivators… If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors [such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family] are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''If we ask the right questions, the answers generally are easy to get.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things?Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''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 everyday 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.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''High-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the most important parts of our life of the resources it needs to flourish.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''You will be constantly pressured, both at home and at work, to give people and projects your attention. How do you decide who gets what? Whoever makes the most noise? Whoever grabs you first? You have to make sure that you allocate your resources in a way that is consistent with your priorities. You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern. And you have to make sure that you’re thinking about all these in the right time frame—overcome the natural tendency to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. They are worth fighting for.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships onto the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. ''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''While most of us do have a deliberate strategy of creating deep, love-filled relationships with members of our family and our friends, in reality we invest in a strategy for our lives that we would never have aspired to: having shallow friendships with many but deep friendships with none; becoming divorced, sometimes repeatedly; and having children who feel alienated from us within our own homes, or who are raised by a stepparent sometimes thousands of miles away. And we can’t turn the clock back.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''People in their later years in life so often lament that they didn’t keep in better touch with friends and relatives who once mattered profoundly to them. Life just seemed to get in the way. The consequences of letting that happen, however, can be enormous. I’ve known too many people who have had to walk through a health struggle or a divorce or a job loss alone—with nobody to provide a sounding board or other means of support. That can be the loneliest place in the world.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

 ''[A] common… mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, ‘I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.’ Guess what. By that time the game is already over.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''When a company understands the jobs that arise in people’s lives, and then develops products and the accompanying experiences required in purchasing and using the product to do the job perfectly, it causes customers to instinctively ‘pull’ the product into their lives whenever the job arises. But when a company simply makes a product that other companies also can make—and is a product that can do lots of jobs but none of them well—it will find that customers are rarely loyal to one product versus another. They will switch in a heartbeat when an alternative goes on sale.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''One of the most important jobs you’ll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse. Getting this right, I believe, is critical to sustaining a happy marriage.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Many unhappy marriages are often built upon selflessness. But the selflessness is based on the partners giving each other things that they want to give, and which they have decided that their partner ought to want…It’s easy for any of us to make assumptions about what our spouse might want, rather than work hard to understand the job to be done in our spouse’s life.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''If your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they?...If you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Encourage them [your children] to stretch—to aim for lofty goals. If they don’t succeed, make sure you’re there to help them learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough. Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child striving for an out-of-reach goal.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''The challenges your children face serve an important purpose: they will help them hone and develop the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives. Coping with a difficult teacher, failing at a sport, learning to navigate the complex social structure of cliques in school—all those things become ‘courses’ in the school of experience. We know that people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they’ve taken the wrong ‘courses’.’’

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Children might feel ‘success’ in the short term by getting what they want in beating up a sibling, or talking back to a parent who finally relents to an unreasonable demand. Parents who let such behavior slide are essentially building a family culture—teaching their child that this is the way the world works, and that they can achieve their goals the same way each time.''
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''Most of us will face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. But over time, they can play out far more dramatically. It happens exactly the same way in companies. No company deliberately sets out to let itself be overtaken by its competitors. Rather, they are seemingly innocuous decisions that were made years before that led them down that path.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

''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 who were extremely well-respected by their colleagues and peers falling from grace because they made this mistake.''

― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?