What constitutes a successful life? Ultimately, the value in your life does not come from earning money. Value arises from the opportunity to grow and learn, recognition for your achievements, and building a happy life outside of work. Achieve this by accomplishing the 6 pillars below.
“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.
How was this summary?
Save someone 21 min
If you would like to suggest changes to this summary as the original author, click here.