For all of you leadership/peak performance junkies out there, the July/August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review is a great read. One article in particular, Clayton Christensen’s "How Will You Measure Your Life?" draws interesting parallels between finding happiness at work and in life, and he offers several recommendations for getting happy that apply to both.
His concluding recommendation is this: Find a metric by which your life/career will be judged and then resolve to live every day to that end. His advice got me thinking about a friend of mine who seems to have built both a successful career and a happy life, and I wondered if he had a "metric" that mattered to him. I had a chance to find out last weekend, when he and I were on the patio tending the barbeque. I mentioned the article and asked him what he attributed his good life to.
He told me that when he was much younger, he went through a devastating personal loss that caused him to question the very meaning of life. He struggled for several years until he realized that there were only a few things in life that were really important to him and that as long as he kept his focus on those few things, he felt happy.
For him, those things are (1) love and respect others, (2) work hard, (3) learn, and (4) have fun. He said he tries to live those values 100% of every day, he surrounds himself only with people who live that way, and he avoids those who don't. This applies to his personal life as well as work.
Christensen's article suggests there really is no difference between what makes us happy at work and what makes us happy in the rest of our lives. As you work on your personal leadership development, here are a few questions to ask yourself. Are you happy enough? Have you figured out your metrics? What’s most important to you? What are you resolved to live by? Do you surround yourself at work and in life with people who share your values? How much in alignment are your metrics and you life? What would others say is important to you by observing the life you lead?
Remember, what gets measured gets done. It's hard to figure out how to quantitatively measure values such as "How much am I respecting others today?" or "How much fun am I having this week?" But it's a good problem to work on.
