“Create a strategy for your life”

• When companies decide to rely on tangible, quick gains, they often fail to allocate resources for better, long-term investments.
• Focusing on the short-term and day-to-day tasks will not yield long-term success and happiness.
• e.g., preoccupation with work can lead to an underinvestment in family.
• In the long term, this will likely yield estrangement.

“Allocate Your Resources”

• Like companies, there is a limited amount of time and resources in your life.
• Individuals allocate a lot of their resources to work because their achievements at work are tangible - a good meeting or sale, obtaining a client.
• Similar metrics are less clear for families
• Children misbehave, spouses argue.
• Allocating too much of your time and resources to work will cause you to miss the long-term rewards and felicity of a strong familial bond.

“Create a Culture”

• Creating a culture at a company requires significant time and effort by management to ensure buy-in by employees.
• The effects of good company culture are immense, yielding greater productivity and better output.
• If you want your family to be cohesive and your children to have high self-esteem, you have to build these values from the get-go and over years.

“Avoid the ‘Marginal Costs’ mistakes”

• There will be times and extenuating circumstances that you will be tempted to betray the values around which you have structured your life.
• Betraying these values even a single time will likely turn into repeated actions.
• The more you do something that you know is wrong, the less wrong it feels and the more you do it.

“Remember the Importance of Humility”

• An overinflated sense of self worth and a failure to listen to the advice that individuals you perceive to be less smart than you restrict your learning opportunities.
• By having respect for everyone including yourself, you avoid the follies of arrogance and pride.

“Choose the Right Yardstick”

• Accumulating money should not be your only goal in life.
• Everyone has to figure out how to measure success in their own life.
• Once this yardstick is identified, try to live by it every day, so that when you die your life is a success by that metric.