How do you measure your life?

Several years ago,? one of my mentors recommended this book - “How do you measure your life?” and I must say this book is GOLD and I am grateful for the insights from the author, Clayton Christensen in this book.? There are few books which influenced me in a significant way and this is one of them. I read it often and again to remind myself about the most pertinent things in life. Every piece of advice in this book has been life changing and one such thing I remembered last week from this book was about how, when, where, why we need to invest our time and energy…and how to create a culture around this.?

Based on my learnings, I was sharing advice about priorities, energy, choices during the women’s day panels and keynote discussions:

• Always stick to your values and principles
• Be clear about your priorities and the order of those priorities as well
• Make choices and tradeoffs in alignment with the priorities
• Manage your energy, not just your time
• You define You! Don't let anyone or anything define your identity - Be You!?

It’s important that we constantly ask this question to ourselves - How do I measure my life? What does success mean? These are questions we ask day in and day out in our professional lives, it’s even more important to ask in our personal lives often too.

It’s important to have a strategy in personal life as well and realisation of the strategy depends on primarily three things - Resources, Processes and Priorities. We have limited time, energy, wealth and talent to grow several "businesses" like work, relationships with your spouse, children and community. People ask for our time and energy every day. Unless we manage priorities mindfully, our time and energy will be consumed in firefighting the most urgent priorities or mindlessly managing them. Our strategy is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how we spend our time, energy, money and attention. To make sure if we are headed in the direction we want, watch where our resources flow. If they don't support our strategy, it means we are not implementing our strategy at all.?

Many professionals mistakenly believe that they invest in their careers first and spend time with family and loved ones? in later years. But the only way to have those relationships bear fruit later is to invest long before you need them. Don't over invest in work and underinvest in your relationships with loved ones.? Build a robust culture to shape your personal? priorities and ensure you make the right choices in life. Actively choose which priorities matter to your family and engineer the culture that supports these values. A few repetitions left unchecked quickly become the de-facto family culture which is difficult to change. Remember, culture emerges from repeated behavior, and thats true in organizations and families too.

I will leave you with these Inspiring quotes from Clayton Christensen…..

“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

“You can’t find returns in investments you haven’t made.”

“Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.”