As a 17-year-old college student, I had a near-death experience (before it was categorized as such) during an automobile accident. During this intense positive experience, I said to myself, "If this is what it is like to die, it's not all bad." For I was at peace; calmly watching my "life review" play out while time seemed to stand still. That experience forever changed how I lived the rest of my life; for I no longer feared death nor failure as I led a passionate life. People like me who have experienced near-death encounters make life-changing decisions and these "Eureka Effects" can help us all think about death as a peaceful and pleasant ending to this physical life experience.
As a high achiever, in my mid-30s, I became so engaged in my career that my wife divorced me which resulted in my second aha! life-changing moment; realizing that my children and I needed each other. So, I decided to get off the fast career track and refocus on family by seeking joint custody of my young children during the "Kramer vs. Kramer" period of the late 1970s. Although joint custody had only been awarded once (when contested) in the State of Michigan, my lawyer and I were successful in convincing the judge to award joint custody.
How Should High Achievers Think?
Those two life-changing experiences have altered the direction of my personal and professional life. Which brings up a couple of questions that are addressed in a new book entitled, "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen:
How do you keep high achievers from being disrupted in their own lives? Further, can you ever really teach profit-driven capitalists, much less Harvard MBAs, not to be evil?
After Professor Christensen's heart attack, which required immediate stenting, and treatment for follicular lymphoma, during the first half of 2010, there were some who wished he'd slow down; those close to him knew he wouldn't. Then, on Sunday, July 18, 2010, lightning struck a third time. While Christensen spoke at a 6:30 a.m. church meeting, a blood clot lodged just behind his left ear. The stoke killed as much as a quarter of his brain and robbed him of nearly all of his verbal ability. As his vocabulary improved, Christensen set to work in earnest on "How Will You Measure Your Life?" with co-authors James Allworth a former student and Karen Dillon, then editor of the Harvard Business Review.
The book is provocative but reassuring: Peter Drucker meets Mitch Albom. Landing as it does at the nexus of two abominable genres, self-help and business how-to, it earns easy credit for being low on psychobabble and casually self-aware. "How Will You Measure Your Life?" is sharpest on staying motivated in your career and, above all, on parenting.
The logic of one's life signature is what you actually do rather than what you say you do. For example, ambitious people will reliably tell you that family, or being a mother or father, is the most important thing in their lives. Yet when pressed to choose between racing home to deal with a chaotic pre-bedtime scene and staying another hour at the office to solve a problem, they will usually keep working. It's these little everyday decisions that reveal if you're following a path to being the best possible spouse and parent, the authors write.
Does your family come out on top?
As to whether the advice in "How Will You Measure Your Life?" will save ambitious careerists from themselves, the authors are circumspect. In Christensen's experience, when something isn't going well--when, despite outward success, one's life falls apart--"the vast majority of times it's because someone hasn't gotten causality right." They aren't necessarily bad people, they simply aren't enacting a strategy for the life they really want. He has great faith in the capacity of overachievers "to change in ways that previously were unthinkable."
Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 7, 2012
Clayton M. Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?
John Agno: When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women