How Will You Measure Your Life

✒️ Note-Making

Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. We are driven by meaning - Incentives can only get us so far, and sometimes they backfire. We need a sense of purpose, of connection, of meaning in our lives
2. Switch between flexible and deliberate strategy as needed - We simultaneously need to plan a strategy and follow through, yet be flexible and open enough for external feedback and change it as necessary
3. Act with integrity - A strategy is worthless if you don't follow through. Once you have your plan, your values, your rules, stick with them without excuses and without exceptions.
4. Prioritize experience over knowledge - Knowledge is a good resource to have, but it is less valuable than the processes, the hands-on experience that teaches you how to implement that knowledge, that supports agency and intelligence.
5. Invest in relationships and a healthy culture - There's always work to be done, but if we focus too much on that, we will fail to invest in our relationships that are key for our happiness. When a relationship is developed, a healthy culture is formed, a synergy without words that aligns all the members.

Act

📋What should I do to achieve the goals set out by this book?

1. List and test your assumptions - write down every assumption that must hold for your plan to work and for each one describe conditions in which it can fail (pre-mortem style).
2. Switch between emergent and deliberate strategies - when inexperienced, run many small experiments to get feedback and let strategy emerge; once you have evidence, lock in a deliberate course and stick to it.
3. Allocate time to important relationships now - proactively schedule regular, focused time with close friends and family instead of waiting until you “need” them.
4. Be fully present when with loved ones - during interactions remove distractions and engage consciously so your investment compounds over time.
5. Ask the “job” a choice is hired for - before buying or choosing, identify the need you’re trying to satisfy (the job-to-be-done) and use that to set decision criteria.
6. Prioritise giving children agency and real experiences - let children face challenges, make their own choices, and practice processes (problem solving, creativity) rather than only providing more structured resources or classes.
7. Focus child development on processes and priorities - create opportunities that build mental processes and intrinsic priorities (curiosity, motivation) rather than just adding knowledge.
8. Build and communicate shared culture and expectations - create clear group/family decision guidelines, model desired behaviour, and reinforce inclusion and inspiration so members make aligned choices independently.
9. Align actions, time, and money with your stated strategy - convert intentions into concrete commitments (time blocks, spending, responsibilities) to avoid akrasia and ensure the plan is enacted.
10. Set and keep integrity rules to avoid slippery slopes - define clear personal rules you won’t break (so you won’t rely on “just this once”) and refuse to let past investments dictate future choices (avoid sunk-cost decisions).

Relate

⛓ by following this method, what will happen? What is the goal of this book? To find happiness and meaning in your personal life and your career

Critique

✅ relevant research, metaphors or examples that helps to convey the argument

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... There is little substance to use when trying to implement the conclusions of this book

Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

The book is written from the viewpoint of an economist that tries to talk about life's meaning through the lens of business models.

It is a good effort, yet poor result. There is a much higher emphasis on the business models, to cover up for the lack in the personal sphere. This book is "nice", yet without a lot of takeaways.

Outline

Notes

Just because You Have Feathers

We are bad at predicting the future. We tend to cling to Distilling to essentials creates clarity and actionability, to find simple and quick answers to our problems, although they are hardly beneficial.

A good theory doesn't tell us what to think, it tells us how Mental shortcuts enable faster learning through analogies and simplification. It provides the rules such that in the moment we will know what to do, what having to pay the high price of Experimentation and gathering data beforehand Heuristics are mental shortcuts enabling fast automatic decisions.

For example, we don't want to marry five times just to understand what marriage is like, we want a theory that can help with healthy communication.

Finding Happiness in Your Career

Happiness in what you do comes from a feeling of purpose, of great satisfaction. This won't come from compromises, from having an "okay" job. We will know it when we see it.

What Makes Us Tick

We are not just motivated by Incentives shape behavior by making certain actions more attractive, or at least not the basic monetary types that serve as an External motivation crowds out intrinsic drive and sustainability.

External factors such as compensation, status and job security are hygiene factors, without them you will be unsatisfied, but having a lot is irrelevant, having an excess won't bring you joy, like how bring clean is important because it protects you from illness, but being "very clean" isn't very meaningful. winner or loser game

What motivates us is pursuing our passion, having opportunities to grow and have more responsibilities Finding meaning in work increases fulfillment and resilience Intrinsic motivation drives action through internal alignment and passion

What Makes Us Tick

• 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. (Location 244)
• 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. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work. (Location 409)
• In order to really find happiness, you need to 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. (Location 476)

The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity

We need to be mindful when to be Flexible and when to have Grit enables persisting through struggle and challenge. Especially at the beginning, when we don't have a lot of expertise in a field, it is better to be adaptive, to get a lot of Feedback is information that enables behavioral improvement and let our strategy be emergent, as in one that arises from our experiments and experiences in the world.

Then, after we have gained some confidence, we can have a more deliberate strategy, to set a course and maintain it for as long as possible.

This process is Progress and change follow non-linear trajectories with thresholds, we constantly have to retest our assumptions and switch between emergent and deliberate strategies.

You have to reality check your assumptions. To uncover your Conformation bias makes us accept confirming evidence without scrutiny, you need to actually list all the assumptions that have to hold true for you to succeed or for something to work, and check what are the conditions in which each assumption can fail Pre-mortem anticipates failure modes to enable preparation.

The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity

• 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 587)

Your Strategy is not what You Say it is

Having a plan is nice, but useless unless you act upon it. If we experience Knowing the right thing doesn't mean we do it, then all of our good intentions are meaningless. We have to put our actions, money and time where our words are.

We need to be careful not to fall for When a measure becomes a target it loses accuracy, where the metric we use to measure progress creates a gap between our actions and our target.

Usually we also fall for Short term bias, we think that other priorities like family and friends will "always be there", so why not focus more on work now? Or we prioritize making our ego look good for that promotion, instead of developing our capabilities.

In a scarce world, we have to make a conscious choice what to spend our resources on. Our "strategy" is nothing more than a series of choices we make, each one strengthen or weakens it.

Finding Happiness in Your Relationships

The Ticking Clock

In Deep relationships require trust, listening, and empathy, it's all about Timing and Repeated actions yield exponentially increasing returns over time. We have to invest in them early and strong, such that they could grow deep and powerful, and be a meaningful factor in our happiness when we need them.

However, people tend to do the opposite, they have a transactional perception towards people, they invest in others only when they need something, and by that time it's too little too late. Don't think you can neglect your most important relationships in your life and it will be okay, even if you have a strong history. Be there with them now, be fully present, and invest time and energy to it, because that's the most important factor in our life's happiness.

The Ticking Clock

• Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else. If they do, the loss will be yours. (Location 1094)
• The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them. (Location 1146)

What Job Did You Hire that Milkshake for

We can have a much more satisfying life if we understand what is the need that we try to answer by making certain choices. For example, you want a laptop. Do you need a small, simplistic one for working on the go, or do you need a gaming one? each need originates from different reasons and uses the same product for different purposes. That means that the criterions for what is considered the best laptop will be different for each case.

Therefore, by understanding what are the needs, aka the jobs we have for things we choose and do, we would have an easier time making better choices Optimization finds the efficient point balancing outputs and inputs because we would know what's important and what's not, what to look for, and whether something new is just the Distraction by novelty undermines commitment and depth effect.

In relationships, this can cause cases of miscommunication We can't read minds. We think our partner wants one thing, aka that they "hired" us to fulfill a specific need, while in reality it is a completely different one. Like love languages, we each communicate based on (false) assumptions which can cause damage despite best intentions.

Sailing Your Kids on Theseus's Ship

The capabilities theory can guide us towards helping our children grow. It is made of:

1. Resources - usually knowledge they have
2. Processes - mental capacity, solving problems, creativity, creating something using their knowledge
3. Priorities - the why, their interests, motivation and curiosity

In recent years we have neglected processes and priorities for resources. We enlist them to every type of class, from swimming to Chinese, filling them with knowledge, yet they have fewer time and fewer choices. They have knowledge yet they don't have the freedom to explore, to do something with it. They become passive.

We also tend to make too many decisions for them, taking away their agency and trying to override their preferences. We "rescue" them from challenges that could have helped them grow. We turn off their creativity and motivation to pursue their interests.

The Schools of Experience

We as parents tend to focus on the child's resume, instead of their actual capabilities Image vs core. We focus on grades, rather than the ability to learn.

What matters is their experience, the challenges they faced and how they solved them on their own, without having their parents jump to their rescue.Some knowledge requires direct experience to fully understand. Some things you only learn through experience, so we can't take it away from them by solving the problem for them.

The Invisible Hand inside Your Family

The way to align between different people is through a shared culture. The culture serves as decision guidelines, such that people could be both independent, yet make decisions that fit the group's values Social environment shapes behavior and identity through norms and conformity. It's the internalization of the leaders Expectations shape wellbeing through the gap between desires and reality.

A good culture is a form of One-time effort investment yields future benefits, it is an investment yet it pays back greatly. A culture is built through Inclusion means proactively welcoming and believing in others ), (Supports:: Inspiration and being good Role models embody behaviors and values we aspire to adopt. A strong culture becomes the default way of behavior of it's members Identity is shaped by and shapes our social interactions

Staying out of Jail

Just This once

We often fail to make the right choice because we focus too much on Past costs irrationally justify future commitment decisions. We let our past limit our thinking.

We should live with Living in alignment with your values. It's easier to never break our rules, than to do things "just this once". When a line has been crossed, it becomes much easier to cross it again, until eventually the line doesn't exist anymore, and we have failed to live according to our values.

Just This Once

• 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. Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time. (Location 2267)

Epilogue

It is important to find your purpose

EPILOGUE

• 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. (Location 2337)