Choosing a career and succeeding is just a tool for achieving your goals in life. But if there is no goal, life will be empty and boring.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Changjiang Business School” (ID:Weixin_CKGSB), content selected from edited by Harvard Business Review, published by CITIC Publishing House “Management Masters Classic” series, written by Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.

Developing a life strategy

Since 1979, I have been observing the changes in the fate of my Harvard Business School classmates. At the class reunion, I saw more and more people being unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. What is the reason? Because they are deciding how to allocate time, talent and energy, they are not firmly committed to the primary and central position of life.

Harvard Business School recruits 900 new students each year from the global elite. It is shocking that a large proportion of these people have never thought about their goals in life.

I told these students that Harvard Business School may be their last chance to think deeply about this issue. If they think that there will be time and energy to reflect in the future, it must be a broken brain, because the burden of life will only become more and more heavy: you have to pay for a home loan, work 70 hours a week, and have to marry and have children.

For me, having a clear life goal is critical. After becoming a Rhodes scholar, my academic stress became very heavy, equivalent to a year of study outside of Oxford’s normal study time. I decided at that time to spend an hour each night reading and thinking about why God wanted me to be born in this world.

But it’s also challenging to stick to this goal, because spending an extra hour on it means that the time to study econometrics is one hour less. Is it worthwhile to take an hour from busy school to do this? In fact, I was very contradictory at the time, but I persisted and finally found the goal of my life.

If I didn’t do this, but used that hour to learn the latest skills and study the autocorrelation of regression analysis, then I must have wasted my life. I have used econometric tools a few times a year, but the goal of life requires me to practice every day. This is the most useful thing I have ever learned. It is more important to understand the goals of life than to learn what ABC, Balanced Scorecard, Core Competence, Subversive Innovation, 4P Marketing Theory, and Porter Five Force Model.

Choosing a career and succeeding is just a tool to achieve your goals in life. But if there is no goal, life will be empty and boring.

Do a good job of resource configuration

How do you configure your time, energy, and talents to determine what kind of life strategy you have.

I have a lot of “career” to seize these resources: I have to do my best to maintain the relationship between husband and wife, to cultivate excellent children, but also to dedicate the community, strive for a successful career, and do a good job in church service. Since my time, energy and talent are very limited, how should I allocate resources between the various businesses I pursue?

When people who are extremely eager to achieve have more time or extra energy, they will subconsciously invest in activities that seek short-term benefits. And our profession can indeed provide the most concrete proof of our progress. For example, if you launch a product, complete a design, end a lecture, make a transaction, tell a lesson, publish a paper, get paid, get a promotion, and such progress is often clear. visible.

However, your time and energy in your spouse and children is often difficult to get immediate. Children make mistakes every day. Maybe until they are 20 years old, you dare to say “I have a good child.”

You don’t have to pay attention to the relationship with the other half. After all, in normal days, the relationship between husband and wife does not seem to show signs of deterioration. Even the close and friendly relationship with family members is the most powerful and lasting source of happiness. Those who pursue excellence will subconsciously focus on their careers and neglect their investment in the family.

If you have studied the root causes of a business disaster, you will often find that such a failed company has a deliberate pursuit of immediate satisfaction. If you look at your life from the same angle, you will also find an equally astounding and thought-provoking path preference: those that were previously cherished most, and then increasingly difficult to get resources.

Avoid the “marginal cost” error

Finance and economics tell us that when evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk costs and fixed costs, and instead use the marginal cost and marginal revenue of each investment as the basis for decision making.

We learned from the course that this philosophy has made the company more inclined to bet on its past successful experience, while ignoring the ability to build the future. If the future is really just a re-enactment, then this method can be said. But if the future is different from history, this approach is wrong. In fact, the future is almost always changing.

This theory explains the third question I discussed with my students: how to be an upright person and avoid jail. When we face the choices of good and evil in our lives, we often inadvertently apply the marginal cost doctrine. There is a voice that echoes in our brains: “I know that we should notThis should be done, but now the situation is special, it is fine to break the case. This time, there will be nothing wrong with it.

Doing the “wrong thing” with the luck of “this time”, it seems that the marginal cost is extremely low, so it has the temptation to resist. But it eventually swallowed you, letting you forget where the road eventually went, and forget how much it would cost to calculate the option.

I tell you how I recognized the potentially devastating “this time”. I was a member of the Oxford University basketball team. In one year, we did our best and finally finished the season with an unbeaten record. The teammates on the team have become my best friends in my life. Later, we participated in a British basketball game similar to the National College Sports Association Championship, and finally reached the final.

Unfortunately, the competition for the championship is scheduled to be held on Sunday, and I have promised to God at the age of 16 that I will never play on Sunday. I found the coach and explained it to him, but he would be suspicious. My teammates are also unbelievable. After all, I am the starting center of the team. Every teammate ran over and said to me: “You have to play. You can’t break a case, just this time?”

As a devout believer, I ran to one side and prayed, hoping that God could tell me what to do. The revelation I got was very clear, that is, I can’t keep my promise. In the end I did not play this final.

From many perspectives, this is just a small decision. After all, there are thousands of such Sundays in my life. In theory, I can also cross a red line, not as an example. But in retrospect, it is really one of the most important decisions in my life to resist the temptation of “special circumstances, breaking the case once.”

Why do you say this? Because there are endless “special circumstances” in our lives. If I broke the case that time, then in the days to come, I might not be able to stick to myself again and again.

The revelation I got from it is that 100% of the promises are much easier than 98%. If you are based on marginal cost analysis and always succumb to “this time,” then you will be remorseful to the final destination, just like my fellow students. You must have your own insistence and draw a safe bottom line.

Select the right metrics

In 2009, doctors discovered that I had cancer, and I thought that I didn’t have much time. Fortunately, it seems that I seem to have escaped this robbery. But this experience has given me a new and deep understanding of my life.

Many companies have made huge gains through my research, which I know well. I know that I have had an important impact. But the disease made me discover that, for myself, the so-called important influences are just insignificant. This is really interesting. This leads me to the conclusion that God’s evaluation of my scale is not money, but a specific person I have contacted.

I think my life measurement scale also applies to everyone.

My final suggestion is: I want to know exactly what criteria you want to evaluate your life, and insist on putting this standard into everyday life. As long as you can do this, you will Must have a successful life.

Harry School of Business Professor: How do you measure your life?

Author: [United States] Peter Drucker, etc.

Publisher: CITIC Publishing Group