Montly Reads: June 2024

For this monthly edition of the books I read, I will be summarizing just one book. To be honest, the month of June never favors reading more books. I have analyzed this time and again; every year, June seems to slow my reading drastically.

That being said, I will be summarizing the book “How Will You Measure Your Life?“. From the title, you might assume that the book is very long and will solve all of your life problems. Well, it might not, but it offers strategies that can significantly change your perspective on life.

The author starts the book with a prologue, describing how he spends the last day of his course with his students at Harvard Business School. He tells them stories of his student reunions. How during each reunion, he would meet his successful friends who had great jobs, became successful CEOs, and married spouses much better looking than they are. Their lives seemed destined to be fantastic every year.

However, by the 10th reunion, his successful friends slowly stopped coming to their reunions. The author looked into what had happened to them and found that despite their professional accomplishments, many were unhappy.

Behind their professional success, many did not enjoy what they were doing. There were numerous stories of divorces or unhappy marriages. One hadn’t talked to his children for many years, despite living in the same city but on opposite coasts. Another successful CEO was now convicted of federal felony charges.
Alongside these disappointments, there was another set of friends who had led exemplary personal lives.

With all these stories, not only from his own group but also from many others, the author writes about the theories he studied along with his class to bring us this book.
He begins with the measurement of “How can I be sure that”:

1. I will be successful and happy in my career?
2. My relationship with my spouse, my children, my extended family, and close friends will become an enduring source of happiness?
3. I live a life of integrity and stay out of jail?

The author then divides the book into three sections, each offering strategies to help us achieve the goals mentioned above.

Finding Happiness in Your Career

The author starts this section with a quote from Steve Jobs:

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

The starting point of this section is the discussion on priorities. “What’s more important to you in your career?”

Many people fall into the trap of allocating time to whoever screams the loudest and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward, instead of knowing what is really important right now.

The author goes in-depth, explaining “The importance of getting motivation right,” “Do incentives alone make the world go round?”, “Find motivation in places you might not expect,” “Balancing your aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities,” “When individuals cause the problems,” and many more. The author ends the section by saying:

“A strategy - whether in companies or in life - is created via hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy and money. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing, if you are not investing the resouces you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented. Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.

Finding Happiness in Your Relationships

At times I wonder why many of us (including me) seem to focus more on our careers. Many of us are wired with a high need for achievement, a dopamine surge from accomplishment, and our careers are the most immediate way to pursue that. High achievers focus on becoming the person they want to be at work and far less on the person they want to be at home.

Investing our time and energy to be that loving person to our spouse and raising wonderful children often doesn’t yield immediate success. This needs commitment for many years to see the clear evidence of success or to bear the fruit.

That is why we over-invest our time and energy in our careers and under-invest in our families, starving the most important part of our lives that needs to flourish.

Work can bring us a sense of fulfillment, but it lacks in comparison to the enduring happiness we share with our family and friends.

The author takes us through a series of chapters on “Cultivating thoughtful relationships,” “Life investments,” “Doing the job right,” “Keeping Mom and Dad happy,” “Sacrifice and commitment,” “The risky business of outsourcing your child’s true education,” and many more.

In “Sacrifice and Commitment,” I truly believe what the author mentions: “The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.” All around us, we see this equation reversed; we try to extract love and happiness from our spouses like a juice extractor. That isn’t going to work; to receive love, show love without expectations.

Staying Out of Jail

In this section, the author emphasizes the importance of maintaining your own integrity. Your integrity will be tested numerous times with unexpected opportunities that seem tempting and unconscious desires. It is up to you to hold your integral values high and stick with what is true to you.

The strategies and theories the author outlines in his book will help you measure your life. The type of person you want to become, and what the purpose of your life is, is too important to leave to chance.

It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. The opportunities and challenges in your life that allow you to become that person will emerge by their own nature.

The author also shares a wonderful movie, a very old one, that just became my all-time favorite, and I’m going to write about it in another post.

While writing the book, the author was already diagnosed with an illness that put him in a wheelchair. However, with the help of his co-authors, he was able to publish this much-needed masterpiece for our struggling times. Sadly, the author passed away in January 2020, leaving behind one of the best self-help books of the 21st century.

To Clayton Christensen, may the Lord be with you.