Why You Need To Create Your Life
One of my favorite books was written by one of the kindest and wisest people I ever knew: How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clay Christensen.
In the prologue to the book, Clay described coming back to Harvard Business School every five years for his class reunions.
In the five-year reunion, all is well.
“Looking around, everyone seemed so polished and prosperous—we couldn’t help but feel that we really were part of something special.”
In the ten-year reunion, cracks begin to emerge.
“Among my classmates were executives at renowned consulting and finance firms…others were on their way to top spots in Fortune 500 companies…
Despite such professional accomplishments, however, many of them were clearly unhappy. Behind the facade of professional success, there were many who did not enjoy what they were doing for a living.
There were, also, numerous stories of divorces or unhappy marriages. I remember one classmate who hadn’t talked to his children in years, who was now living on the opposite coast from them. Another was on her third marriage since we’d graduated.”
By the twenty-fifth and thirty-year reunions, things were worse.
“Personal dissatisfaction, family failures, professional struggles, even criminal behavior—these problems weren’t limited to my classmates at HBS. I saw the same thing happen to my classmates in the years after we completed our studies as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University.”
I know for sure that none of these people graduated with a deliberate strategy to get divorced or lose touch with their children—much less to end up in jail. Yet this is the exact strategy that too many ended up implementing.”
The trend Clay noted is not unique to Harvard Business School or Oxford University graduates.
This is simply what is likely to happen when a gap emerges between strategy and execution.
We manage strategy and execution ruthlessly in business — quarterly targets, KPIs, RACI charts, status updates, and endless money spent on consultants.
It’s simply obvious to us: you have to set the direction in which you want to go, and then you need to manage the organization carefully day-to-day to make sure it actually gets there.
Your actual life — the thing that you’re never getting back, the one that’s entirely yours to design, the arena in which you are truly irreplaceable — is exactly the same.
Even more so than in your job…
You need to have an idea of what you WANT your life to look like.
And you need to work towards it systematically every day, solving every problem that comes up along the way.
There are three forces that will try to prevent you from doing this.
Societal defaults: The beaten path. What you’re supposed to do. What everyone else does. The voices in your life (and in your head) that tell you to just put your head down and be happy with what you have.
Your own automatic brain: The part of you that wants to skip a workout. That wants to snap at your spouse. That wants one more glass of wine. That wants to keep working because it’s the only way it knows how to block out anxiety.
The ever-present chaos of life: You’re moving houses. It’s the busy season at work. The kids are young. The dog is sick. The basement flooded. Your best team member quit.
The people who create live the lives they want deal with these forces too.
Their social pressure is just as loud.
Their automatic brains are just as inconvenient.
And their daily lives are just as chaotic.
The difference is that they have a vision and a process for managing the execution of that vision, no matter what their life or their brain throws at them.
As smart, talented, and hardworking as you are — the forces conspiring to open a gap between the strategy and the execution of our lives act on all of us.
Don’t be like some of Clay’s classmates at their thirty-year reunion — looking around at their lives and wondering how they ended up exactly where they didn’t want to be.
Measuring your life is just the start.
Setting the vision is just the beginning.
Most importantly of all, you must learn how to create your life.
Actively, day to day. Problem by problem. Goal by goal. Thought by thought.
My four-step process is designed exactly for this — both to define what you want and to tightly manage the process to get there.
Don’t spend your life doing what you’re supposed to, listening to your worst instincts, and putting out the fire of the week, every week.
You are worth so much more than that. You can BE so much more than that.
Come talk to me, and let’s get started.
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