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 musical activity enriches our culture and our personal lives in a profound way, and is a great source of inspiration and enrichment for anyone’s 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.
The Invisible Hand Inside Your Family
“One of the most powerful tools to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture.”
Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. (Edgar Schein)
“A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization…Culture in any organization is formed through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we hope to create a culture that inspires students to be their best and to appreciate the sincere journeys of other artists in a way that helps everyone in the community grow to their fullest potential.
“Left unchecked long enough, ‘once or twice’ quickly becomes the culture. As these sets of behavior embed themselves in a family culture, they become very hard to change.”
“It’s not just about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, ‘Well done’?”
Staying Out of Jail
“Most of us think that the important ethical decisions in our lives will be delivered with a blinking red neon sign: caution: important decision ahead…The problem is, life seldom works that way. It comes with no warning signs. Instead, most of us will face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. But over time, they can play out far more dramatically…it happens exactly the same way in companies.”
“Almost always…analysis shows that the marginal costs are lower, and marginal profits are higher, than the full cost. This doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different – and it almost always is – then it’s the wrong thing to do.”
We believe in the importance of details in our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me. Details matter, and over time it is the details and habits we have paid attention to or neglected that cause exponential results, either positively or negatively.
Companies should ask: “‘If we didn’t’ have an existing business, how could we best build a new one? What would be the best way for us to serve our customers?’…Failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, we end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not.”
“As Henry Ford once put it, ‘If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.’ Thinking on a marginal basis can be very, very dangerous…The marginal cost of doing something ‘just this once’ always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher…A voice in our head says, ‘Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay.’ And the voice in our head seems to be right; the price of doing something wrong ‘just this once’ usually appears alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t see where that path is ultimately headed or the full cost that the choice entails.”
“You don’t realize the road you are on until you look up and see you’ve arrived at a destination you would have once considered unthinkable.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me, we not only strive to develop students in their musical aptitude, but also in their development as wholesome human beings. We believe that the focus that it takes to achieve excellence in music can (and should) be applied to living a life of excellence.
“If you give in to ‘just this once,’ based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. that’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary- your personal moral line- is powerful, because you don’t’ cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.”
“You can see the immediate costs of investing, but it’s really hard to accurately see the costs of not investing.”
“The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.”
One of the most important lessons of character development that can be learned in the course of attaining musical proficiency is that ‘playing the long game’ matters. At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we teach that patience and consistency work together powerfully to generate long-term results.
The Importance of Purpose
The three parts of purpose: “The first is what I will call a likeness. By analogy, a master painter often will create a pencil likeness that he has seen in his mind, before he attempts to create it in oils…Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitment – almost a conversion – to the likeness that they are trying to create…The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress…These three parts – likes, commitment, and metrics – comprise a company’s purpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance.”
“The type of person you want to become- 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, by their very nature, be emergent…I’m glad that I wasn’t’ too rigid in how I could achieve my purpose.”
“The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”
It is our belief at our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me that music is much more than sound, music is relationships. The highest affect a musician and artist can achieve is to positively influence others. This can be done in the context of worship or in the community, at large. Making a distinctive difference in the lives of others is, ultimately, what brings meaning to life.
The author speaks of his students: “Fast-paced careers, family responsibilities, and tangible rewards of success tend to swallow up time and perspective. They will just sail off from their time at school without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, the five forces, and other key business theories we teach at Harvard.”
The author had many insightful points, relating business back to family and personal decisions. His experience of seeing his own colleagues, as well as a number of his own students, making failed life-decisions echoes through the pages of this book. The question posed as the title: ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’ is the foundation for every life decision we will ultimately make.