The following contains excerpts from the book, How Will You Measure Your Life? (Clayton M. Christensen).
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we believe that the pursuit of learning music is an activity that brings happiness and fulfillment to life.
The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, has given much thought to the values that guide our personal lives as well as those that guide our businesses. Noticing, from his own experience, highly talented and motivated people from his own graduating class becoming very successful in business, yet profoundly failing in their own personal lives, initiated the author’s development of several ‘theories’ to apply and predict success or failure in both business and life.
He divides the book into three sections: How can I be sure that
- I will be successful and happy in my career?
- My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
- I live a life of integrity- and stay out of jail?
“People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rear-view mirror – because data is only available about the past.
Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it…That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in ‘if-then’ statements.’”
Success and Happiness in Career
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. (Steve Jobs)
“We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.”
The Two-factor theory, or Motivation theory
“It acknowledges that you can pay people to want what you want- over and over again. But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.”
“Frederick Herzberg…notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is on a big continuous spectrum- starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the other- is not actually the way the mind words. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.”
“Hertzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator…You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation…At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we hope to inspire greatness in the lives of our students, helping them pursue their passion by giving them tools that will increase their success.
“Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feeling that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arises from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.”
“Many of my peers had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these. On the surface, they had lots of good reason to do exactly that…it wasn’t too long, however, before some of them privately admitted that they had actually begun to resent the jobs they’d taken- for what they now realized were the wrong reasons. Worse still, they found themselves stuck. The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money…If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job- even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.”
“In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.”
“You need to ask yourself…Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility?”
“You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we help students prepare for a wide array of possible directions by training them in the fundamentals of the craft of making music.
“Henry Mintzberg taught options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities…When you put in place a plan focused on these anticipated opportunities, you are pursuing a deliberate strategy. The second source of options is unanticipated – usually a cocktail of problems and opportunities that emerges while you are trying to implement the deliberate plan or strategy that you have decided upon…The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees.”
“Often, however, a modified strategy coalesces from myriad day-to-day decisions to pursue unanticipated opportunities and resolve unanticipated problems. When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me, we endeavor to help students see their own potential and how it fits with the opportunities they see around them.
The author gives the example of Honda motorcycles back in the 1960s trying to compete with large American motorbikes. They were failing with their initial strategy. Along with their big motorbikes, they also had initially shipped a few smaller motorbikes, which were used in Japan for deliveries in urban shops along narrow roads. One weekend, a member of Honda’s team took a Super Cub to the dirt-hills around Los Angeles to ride and had a lot of fun doing it. The next weekend, he invited some friends to do the same, and they enjoyed it, too. Soon after this, a buyer for Sears saw a Honda employee riding around on a Super Cub and asked if Sears could sell it through its catalogue. Little by little, Honda began to realize that the smaller bikes were their entry into the U.S. market. The Super Cubs found an entirely new consumer, what came to be known as ‘off-road bikers.’
“I’m always struck by how many of my students and the other young people I’ve worked with think they’re supposed to have their careers planned out, step by step, for the next five years. High-achievers, and aspiring high-achievers, too often put pressure on themselves to do exactly this…we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey.”
“If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense…But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent. This is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly.”
In our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we prepare students with foundational principles that they can use in any musical and artistic direction they may choose, while at the same time helping the student to focus on what makes them unique. This helps them see unusual opportunities that may be in live with their specific strengths.
“Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interest, and priorities begin to pay off.”
“There’s a tool that can help you test whether your deliberate strategy or a new emergent one will be a fruitful approach. It forces you to articulate what assumptions need to be proved true in order for the strategy to succeed…called…‘discovery-driven planning,’ but it might be easier to think about it as ‘What has to prove true for this to work?’”
“What are the most important assumptions that have to prove right for these projections to work – and how will we track them?”
“When a promising new idea emerges…ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: ‘Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?’ The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain. While the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain.”
“Find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.”
This is a “simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course. It causes teams to focus on what truly matters to get the numbers to materialize. If we ask the right questions, the answers generally are easy to get.”
“Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: ‘What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?’ List them. Are they within your control?”
Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators?”
Our goal at our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me is to help the student find their way forward in their own unique artistic and musical pursuits in a manner that is fulfilling and rewarding.