Archivos para octubre, 2010

“How will you measure your life” – Clayton Christensen

Acabo de leer un artículo muy bueno publicado por Clayton Christensen en la página de Harvard Business Review. El título del artículo es “How will you measure your life?” y el mismo nos habla sobre tres cosas principalmente:

1) Cómo ser felices en nuestra carrera profesional

2) Cómo hacer que nuestra relación con nuestra esposa e hijos nos traiga felicidad

3) Cómo evitar terminar en la cárcel

El artículo está relativamente largo pero vale la pena leerlo. A continuación comparto algunos de mis fragmentos favoritos.

Sobre cómo medir nuestra vida…

“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”

Sobre la importancia de pensar…

“When I was a Rhodes scholar… I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life. Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day.”

Sobre la forma en la cual invertimos nuestro tiempo…

“People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness. 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.”

Sobre la forma de evitar terminar en la cárcel

“Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. 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 OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails… The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up.”

Sobre lo que implica ser humilde…

“One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others.

Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.”

Ninguna idea es radical o nueva. No obstante, es muy fácil olvidar estos conceptos si no nos hacemos el objetivo de recordarlos cada día.