How Will You Measure Your Life?

I'm currently reading a book by Clayton Christensen. Now if there are two people mentioned more than anyone else here at business school, they're Steve Jobs and Clayton Christensen. Anyway, yesterday I was reading about our personal strategy, and how we have two strategies: deliberate and emergent.

A deliberate strategy is what you want to do - what you plan on doing. An emergent strategy is what just ends up happening. The key is figuring out when you should turn an emergent strategy into your deliberate strategy. And our strategy, whether deliberate or emergent, is created through hundreds of daily decisions.

From his book: "To understand a company's strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they do," and "We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs." Christensen says one of the problems professionals often have is that they prioritize the things that give quick returns - promotions, raises, bonuses - and neglect the things that require long-term work, but that won't show returns for decades, like raising children.

One of the worries of focusing on these short-term returns is that we use them to finance an ever-expanding lifestyle. As a result, we are then unable to cut back on work to focus on something at home - we're trapped. As one of my professors has said, you need to give yourself options. He also advised us to have "go to hell" money, the idea being that if you have a monetary cushion/you're not tied down to financial obligations, you don't have to remain stuck in a bad situation.

Something I've talked with Kristen about is that when we (hopefully) have money once I graduate and start a new job, we can't be seduced by the sudden influx of cash and start buying things. It's alluring even now, thinking about the money we may have in the future: "The first thing we're buying is a new washer!" or "I can't wait to buy a house that's all ours."

The most important thing to me in my life is my family - not my career or my material possessions (although some may question that when I talk about our huge, awesome TV - but hey, it was on sale!). Now it just remains for me to spend the next 30 years proving to my family that they really are my number one priority. After all, actions truly do speak louder than words.