How Will You Measure Your Life
✒️ Note-Making
🔗Connect
⬆️Topic:: Life's Mission
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
🗒️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 Simplicity, 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. 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.
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, or at least not the basic monetary types that serve as an External Motivation.
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 job crafting Intrinsic Motivation
- 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. 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 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 non linear, 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, 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.
- 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 Akrasia, 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 Goodhart’s Law, 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 Relationships, it's all about Timing and compounding. 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.
- 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 because we would know what's important and what's not, what to look for, and whether something new is just the shining new thing 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:
- Resources - usually knowledge they have
- Processes - mental capacity, solving problems, creativity, creating something using their knowledge
- 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.experience knowledge. 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. It's the internalization of the leaders Expectations.
A good culture is a form of Effort Storing, it is an investment yet it pays back greatly. A culture is built through Inclusion ), (Supports:: Inspiration and being good Role Models. A strong culture becomes the default way of behavior of it's members Interpersonal Identity
Staying out of Jail
Just This once
We often fail to make the right choice because we focus too much on Sunk Cost. We let our past limit our thinking.
We should live with Integrity. 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.
- 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
- 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)