Omar Usman – 3 Lessons From How Will You Measure Your Life Clayton Christensen
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
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.