Life Strategy?

So the last few posts were about being engaged in each day and this post is about examining your life as a whole.

The speech by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen reposted here, titled "How Will you Measure your Life?" encourages you to apply some business principles to your personal life. I know it sounds dehumanizing to consider yourself a company but he isn't talking about how much revenue growth you have year to year in terms of salary, he is talking about how you allocate your resources and your strategy/mission for your life.

I first came across this article when I peeked over at the woman I was sitting next to on the subway to see what she was reading. Harvard Business Review...interesting. Anyway, I did chat with her and I later looked up the article online.

The first time I read "How Will you Measure your Life?" I had two immediate reactions

1. I think this guy "gets" it.

2. How do I find an hour a day to reflect and pray about the purpose for my own life?

What do I mean by he "gets" it? I mean that I think it is uncommon for most people to dedicate time to thinking about the purpose of their lives. It is one of those big questions that either gets neglected in the frenzy of a busy life or one that gets ignored because there are a million easier things to do than think about the purpose of your life. I think that having a life purpose/vision/mission statement helps anchor you when life gets crazy. I think its pretty remarkable he allocated an hour a day during his Rhodes scholar life. I also generally agree with his conclusion

"Donʼt worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about

the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: 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."

I guess since I'm advocating living consciously every day, I also need to add that it goes hand in hand with living consciously towards a purpose. I haven't followed through on my desire to spend an hour or even half an hour each day dedicated to quiet time and reflection but since I have a blog audience I am issuing a public challenge to myself to allocate a half hour each day towards thinking about how I'm going to measure my life and I'm sure it will turn into more blog posts :)

Let me know if any of you want to try this with me!

No more living for the weekend

So this post is about getting stuck in a rut and then trying to stay out of one.

There was a period early in my career where the novelty of work had worn off and I found myself unhappy and dissatisfied but instead of working towards pinpointing the source of the problems and finding a solution, I found various ways to forget about them. This actually made things worse. I found myself catching up on tv shows and finding new ones in an effort to forget about the current day and avoid thinking about the upcoming workday. I can't remember when I snapped out of the "waiting for the weekend" mode of thinking but I do believe I gradually convinced myself that the problem couldn't be that bad and that a solution was possible.

There are a lot of good themes to focus on in David Foster Wallace's commencement speech (link is here) but I found his ideas about choosing to be present and his acknowledgement of how hard that can be to be

Take his description of visiting the grocery store (14th St Union Sq. Trader Joes anyone?)

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d-people.

When stuck on a crowded, slow-moving train, or in a long grocery line, you have no control over anything but your own thoughts (if that). How we think and react to the mundane and irritating aspects of our lives can be as important as the "big" moments because most of us will inevitably have more days that are considered mundane than exciting. I don't allow myself to mentally check out anymore (at least not for more than a day) but I think the next excerpt captures what I'm trying to say :

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I think he is right...and it isn't easy but it is worth it to "stay conscious".

Quarterlife crisis readings

Having a quarterlife crisis is definitely something that would be hashtagged on twitter as #firstworldproblems but it is a relatively common topic amongst my peers.

Part of the difficulty of graduating from college is realizing that

1. There is no longer a clear road map to "success". You got into college and graduated. Maybe you have a job now too. Now what?

2. There are no longer grades, tests, papers, and other external sources of measurement and praise for your self worth. Hopefully, your self worth was never dependent on these external measurements to begin with.

3. You and your friends are no longer on "equal" footing. Different working hours, salaries, and professions can create subtle changes in relationships where in the past we were all students.

4. Life was never fair but once you leave academia there is no pretense of trying to make life appear fair.

5. You realize that the process of getting a job at your firm was more challenging than your day to day work.

I think each of the 5 issues above can contribute to some reassessment of our life, time, and relationships.

There have been two influential articles/essays for me during my period of reassessment.

I want to explore David Foster Wallace's commencement speech (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html) further on Wednesday

and the essay about How to Measure a Life from Harvard Business School (http://alexcusack.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/how-will-you-measure-your-life.pdf) on Thursday.

The commencement speech focuses on how to live and think in the present while the HBS essay applies some principles used in assessing companies on your own life.