Omar Usman – 3 Lessons From How Will You Measure Your Life Clayton Christensen

Hey, guys. Omar Osman here. Welcome to my

new YouTube channel. On this channel, I'm going

to be doing book reviews, but not in

the traditional way. I'll be doing 3 lessons

that I've learned from a book in 3

minutes.

Today, we're talking about How Will You Measure

Your Life by Clayton Christensen.

The basic premise of this book is why

are we here, and how do we know

we're making a difference? He split the book

up into 3 sections, career, relationships, and what

he calls get out of jail free. Now

in the first section about careers,

he talks about why we take certain careers

or why we go into a certain job.

And one of the main traps that we

fall into is taking a job for money.

And he outlines the fact that money is

actually a hygiene factor. So So it's an

environmental factor. It's like what kind of office

you have, what kind of chair you sit

in. You know, these types of things, he

puts money into that category. The problem that

we have is that we'll take a job

because of the salary, because of the money,

and then our lifestyle expands to fill that

type of income, and then we're stuck. We're

trapped, and we can't get out. So he

says we should be looking for more meaningful

indicators

as to a job that we'll like. And

for that, he identifies what meaningful work is.

So meaningful work is to look at, do

you agree with the vision? Do you agree

with the mission? Are you doing work that

challenges you? Are you doing work that makes

you think, that makes you feel fulfilled?

Look for that as the primary motivator. You

can't ignore the hygiene factors, but make sure

the underlying theme is something meaningful, something challenging,

and then look at the money and the

other things. In the second section, she talks

about relationships.

And in relationships, she talks specifically about high

achievers.

See, high achievers,

they tend to do what brings them the

most benefit with their immediate action. And so

for a lot of people, that means that

they end up sacrificing their relationships,

specifically their family life. Because on a day

to day basis, things seem okay. Things are

going fine. There hasn't been a big catastrophe,

but then, eventually, after 5 years, 10 years,

or 20 years, things fall apart, and it's

hard to pinpoint exactly what happened. And he

says you have to be sure to take

care of your relationships because at the end

of your life, that's what you'll value the

most, is your family and your friends. And

so one tip that he gives that stood

out to me was he said, you know,

have a setup, have a system in place

that protects the balance of your relationships. For

example,

give your spouse

veto power over your calendar. That's a very

easy to way to make sure that you

keep your relationships

and your career in the proper balance. In

the 3rd section, he talks it's called Get

Out of Jill Free, but this section is

about marginal and full thinking, and this is

probably one of the biggest takeaways

that people who have read this book have.

He gives the example of Blockbuster and Netflix.

When Netflix first started, they were challenging Blockbuster,

and Blockbuster looked at it and they said,

the margins that they're making, the money that

they're making on these DVD rentals

it's just not enough to entice us to

do it. And if we were to do

it and we were to double down on

this business model, it would mean that we

would put our physical stores out of business,

so there's really no incentive for us to

do this. We know how that story ended.

Netflix ended up putting Blockbuster completely out of

business. And so Christensen says that you have

to, you know, you have to have an

an agile mentality,

that if we were starting from scratch, what

would we be what would we do? And

don't be afraid to go down that route.

But he goes one step further,

and that is that he applies this marginal

and full thinking to our personal lives. And

he says a lot of times we make

decisions and we'll say things like, you know,

it's not gonna hurt just this one time,

or I can do it one time. I

can do it just this, you know, just

this time, and there won't be any consequences.

He says over time, those add up, and

we don't realize how big the consequences are

going to be. So even in your personal

life, make sure that you have a full

mentality, that you're paying attention to what you're

doing, and you don't compromise on your values.

Hope you enjoyed the video. We've got more

book reviews coming. Make sure you hit subscribe

and hit the like button. Thanks.