How will you measure your life

I really like some of the take-away messages in this HBR article I read this morning.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen 

http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

 In case you don't have time to read it, here are my favorite quotes:

• "Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. 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."

• "... 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. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

• "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."

This article fits the theme of my last weeks Family Office Forum conference. I was asked to take notes for the conference titled "How to manage family wealth". It was a conference full of multimillionaires but the end key note speaker, Rabbi Steve Leder, closed with a spectacular lesson that even I could identify with. Some of his main messages are listed below. I enjoyed hearing him speak so much that I think I might even invest in his book "More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul".

·         My favorite message of Steve Leder was "You cannot be great at more than one thing.  You can be good at a lot of thing. You have to choose what you want to be great at and make peace with the things you want to be just good at.

He closed with an activity of writing an ethical will that bequeaths our non-material value and assets to our children and grandchildren and the theme of "thinking about how to live now like a good ancestor". It made me think a lot about how I want to be remembered and the things that we remember people for- not their credentials or net worth but their self worth and contribution.

The speaker then played the song " My old man" by Steve and Bud Goodman and we discussed the line “To hear what he said when I wasn’t listening”. The song made me think of my poppy who passed away and all of the brilliant wisdom he shared through his everyday life's actions.