How will you measure your life? Charles Assisi pays tribute to a mentor

Everyone knew Clayton Christensen was ill; he’d been ill for a long while. But when he died on January 24, millions around the world still felt the blow.

It was impossible that anyone who had read his books, heard him speak, or studied strategy under his tutelage at Harvard would be unaffected. He was among those rare teachers who could ask, lightly, the questions that matter most. Such as: how will you measure your life?

His answers to that one were first published by the Harvard Business Review in 2010. The ideas were subsequently expanded upon in a book that was impossible to put down.

He started with, “Create a strategy for your life.” From anyone else, it might have sounded like boardroom tripe. But Christensen was different.

“Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and centre as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.” 

How do you create a strategy? Allocate your resources. This sounds like common sense, but it took an uncommon teacher like Christensen to lay out why we so easily go wrong here.

“...Our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward… In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, I raised a good son or a good daughter… If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.”

With this done, he always said, you needed to Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake, because “…it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.” Essentially, if you let yourself think, ‘oh it’s all right, just this once’, chances are you will let yourself slip again and again.

As an example, Christensen, always deeply spiritual, had just committed at 16 to observing the Sabbath, when the baseball team he was on got into the finals, which were on a Sunday. After much heartache, he declined to participate. “Looking back on it,” he wrote, “I realize that resisting the temptation in this one extenuating circumstance… proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.”

The import of that stayed with me and Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake is a golden rule I deploy when compelled to choose between something of transitory import and a principle that may, in that moment, sound trivial.

By way of example, on the weekend he died, I felt conflicted about whether to lace up and train as my coach thought I must, or stay in bed “just this once” as the heart suggested I do. I thought I could hear Clayton Christensen tell me, “If you give in to ‘just this once’, based on a marginal cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up.”

That was all I needed to get me to lace up and hit the road. It was my tribute to one of the great teachers of our time.

(The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)