People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rear-view mirror—because data is only available about the past. (Location 196)
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs (Location 244)
Frederick Herzberg, probably one of the most incisive writers on the topic of motivation theory, published a breakthrough article in the Harvard Business Review, focusing on exactly this. (Location 374)
Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. (Location 400)
Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (Location 401)
The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money. (Location 432)
In order to really find happiness, you need to (Location 464)
continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do. (Location 465)
For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy. Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. They are, after all, what our friends and family see as signs that we have “made it” professionally. But as soon as you find yourself focusing on the tangible aspects of your job, you are at risk of becoming like some of my classmates, chasing a mirage. The next pay raise, you think, will be the one that finally makes you happy. It’s a hopeless quest. (Location 476)
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance. (Location 480)
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one. (Location 568)
“What are the most important assumptions that have to prove right for these projections to work—and how will we track them?” (Location 649)
When a promising new idea emerges, financial projections should, of course, be made. But instead of pretending these are accurate, acknowledge that at this point, they are really rough. Since everybody knows that numbers have to look good for management to green-light any project, you don’t go through the charade of implicitly encouraging teams to manipulate the numbers to look as strong as possible. (Location 653)
Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control? (Location 670)
Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. (Location 673)
What evidence do you have? Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Make sure you are being realistic about the path ahead of you. (Location 674)
In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend. (Location 845)
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented. (Location 866)
How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. If it is not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, you run the risk of a serious problem. You might think you are a charitable person, but how often do you really give your time or money to a cause or an organization that you care about? (Location 869)
If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top? (Location 872)
Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person. (Location 873)
capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. (Location 980)
What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve. The same is true in our relationships: we go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships. (Location 1112)
Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn’t intuitively map in customers’ minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job. (Location 1227)
The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends—every day. (Location 1251)
Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel success every day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero. When structured to do the job of success, students (Location 1261)
eagerly master difficult material—because in doing so, they are getting the job done. (Location 1262)
the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. (Location 1308)
Perhaps nothing deserves sacrifice more than family—and not just that others should sacrifice for you, but that you should sacrifice for your family, too. I believe it is an essential foundation to deep friendships and fulfilling, happy families and marriages. (Location 1332)
The Resources, Processes, and Priorities model of capabilities can help us gauge what our children will need to be able to do, given the types of challenges and problems that we know they will confront in their future. (Location 1466)
Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it. (Location 1487)
When we so heavily focus on providing our children with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences? (Location 1513)
Balance is important, and there are valuable lessons your children will gain from facing the challenges that life will throw at them on their own. (Location 1586)
Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all these experiences—outsourcing—you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives. (Location 1594)
“Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?” (Location 1709)
Creating experiences for your children doesn’t guarantee that they’ll learn what they need to learn. If that doesn’t happen, you have to figure out why that experience didn’t achieve it. You might have to iterate through different ideas until you get it right. The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life. (Location 1794)
Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. (Location 1839)
If you want your family to have a culture of kindness, then the first time one of your kids approaches a problem where kindness is an option—help him choose it, and then help him succeed through kindness. Or if he doesn’t choose it, call him on it and explain why he should have chosen differently. (Location 1912)
You need to be sure that when you ask your children to do something, or tell your spouse you’re going to do something, you hold to that and follow through. (Location 1946)
Because failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, we end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not. (Location 2067)
you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again. (Location 2164)
Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time. (Location 2168)
The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way. (Location 2179)
These three parts—likeness, commitment, and metrics—comprise a company’s purpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued. When that is in place, however, then how the company gets there is typically emergent—as opportunities and challenges emerge and are pursued. The greatest corporate leaders are conscious of the power of purpose in helping their companies make their mark on the world. (Location 2222)
The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. The opportunities and challenges in your life that allow you to become that person will, by their very nature, be emergent. (Location 2231)
Understanding the three parts composing the purpose of my life—a likeness, a commitment, and a metric—is the most reliable way I know of to define for yourself what your purpose is, and to live it in your life every day. (Location 2237)
From these parts of my life, I distilled the likeness of what I wanted to become: A man who is dedicated to helping improve the lives of other people A kind, honest, forgiving, and selfless husband, father, and friend A man who just doesn’t just believe in God, but who believes God (Location 2251)