要如何衡量自己的人生——克莱顿·克里斯坦森

2010年春，哈佛大学邀请了因为提出“颠覆性创新”而名满天下的管理学教授克莱顿·克里斯坦森（Clayton M. Christensen）为毕业生做演讲，请他向全体学生阐述如何把管理学思维模型运用于每个人的具体生活中。

当受邀参与演讲时，克里斯坦森已经被诊断出患了癌症。正经历着人生的至暗时刻，他将自己对于生命的感悟以及取得幸福快乐人生的经验，进行了系统总结并倾囊相授。

也正因为用心至极，这场演讲取得了极大成功，不仅深深感动了现场的学生，也在全社会引起广泛讨论。 以下是演讲的精华版，希望每个人看完后都能从中汲取一点生活的智慧，从而过上自己理想的人生。

【商业智慧】你要如何衡量你的一生

以下是演讲精华版

在《创新者的窘境》出版前，我曾接到来自时任英特尔董事长安迪.格鲁夫（Andrew Grove）的电话。格鲁夫读过我早期关于颠覆式创新的一篇论文，想让我向他的下属讲讲我的研究，以及这套理论对英特尔的启示。

我兴奋地飞到硅谷，如约到达会面地点，结果格鲁夫却说：“你看，出了点状况。我们只能给你10分钟时间，直接给我们说说，你那套颠覆式创新的模型对英特尔来说意味着什么。” 我回答说我做不到，至少需要30分钟来解释这套模型，因为只有了解了模型之后，针对英特尔的分析才有意义。

我讲解了10分钟，格鲁夫打断了我：“听着，我已经了解了你的模型，直接告诉我们它对英特尔的价值是什么。”

我坚持说，我还需要10分钟讲述颠覆式创新在钢铁等不同行业的发生过程，好让格鲁夫及其团队理解颠覆式创新的运作原理。

我向他们讲述了纽柯（Nucor）钢铁公司和其它小钢铁厂如何颠覆了最低端的钢筋和螺纹钢筋市场，然后逐步向高端延伸，击败了传统的钢铁业巨头。在我讲完了小钢铁公司的时候，格鲁夫说：“好，我懂了。颠覆式创新对英特尔而言意味着…….” 他接着清晰地阐述了公司将发布赛扬处理器的计划，作为抢占低端市场的战略。

自那以后，我曾无数次回忆起这段往事。要是我当初一味地告诉格鲁夫，他应该重视微处理器业务的话，我恐怕当场就被“干掉”了。相反，通过告诉他如何去思考而不是应该思考什么，他自己得出了我视为正确的决定。

这段经历给我带来了深远的影响。每当有人问我该怎么做时，我很少直接给出答案，而是将问题融入我的一个模型中。我会描述模型在截然不同的行业运作的过程，然后对方会说：“好，我懂了。” 而且他们自己得出的结论，比我能给出的更加深刻。

我在哈佛商学院教授的课程，是帮助学生了解何为好的管理理论，以及他们是如何产生的。为此，我会借助不同的模型或理论让学生从多维度了解，一位领导者是如何激发创新和推动企业发展的。在每堂课上，我们都会审视一家公司，利用这些理论来分析这家公司目前的格局是如何形成的，以及为了达到想要的结果，该采取哪些管理举措。

在最后一堂课上，我会要求学生利用所学，为以下三个问题提供令人信服的答案：

第一，我如何确保在职业生涯中感到快乐？

第二，我如何确保与配偶及家人的关系成为持续幸福的源泉？

第三，如何做一个正直的人并避免牢狱之灾？

尽管最后一个问题听上去像是在开玩笑，但我是认真的。我当年在牛津大学就读的班级中的所有同学都获得了罗德奖学金，但32个人里两个坐过牢。安然丑闻的涉案人之一杰夫.斯基林，是我在哈佛商学院的同班同学。他们都曾是好人，但他们人生中的一些事情让他们误入歧途。

在学生讨论这些问题的答案时，我用自己的人生经历作为案例，向他们阐释该如何利用课堂所学，来帮助自己做出人生的三个关键决定。

对于第一个问题的答案，即如何确保我们从事业中得到快乐，有一个理论提供了很好的启示。这就是Frederick Herzberg的理论，他认为人生的强大动力并非来自金钱，而是来自学习、在责任中成长、为他人奉献以及个人成就获得认可。

我告诉学生们，在进入学术领域之前，我在经营自己的公司时也得出了类似的感悟。那时我会在脑海中想象这样一个画面：公司的一位经理早上带着较强的自尊心来上班，10小时后她开车回家时，因在工作中未被欣赏与重视、才干得不到发挥而深感灰心丧气。我想象了一下，她在自尊受挫后，会如何影响她与孩子们的相处。

然后，我脑海中的场景快进至另一天可能发生的情形：她带着极大的满足感下班回家，因为当天她学到了很多，自己富有价值的工作得到了认可：她还参与了一些成功的计划，并扮演了重要角色。于是我就想到当她带着这样的感觉回家时，她与配偶及孩子的相处会愉快很多。

由此我得出结论：如果管理者能够出色地完成自己的工作，管理会是最崇高的职业。没有一项职业能像管理一样提供如此多的方式，来帮助他人学习和成长、承担责任、从成就中获得认可，并对团队的成功做出贡献。

越来越多的MBA学员来到商学院，认为进入商界就是从事买卖与投资，这很不幸。做成一单生意带来的满足感，远不如因塑造他人带来的满足感强。

我希望学生们在毕业时能知晓这一点。

为你的人生制定战略

1979年以来，我观察了哈佛商学院同班同学的命运。在同学聚会上，我看见越来越多的人不开心、离了婚，或者与孩子的关系疏远。这是为什么？

因为他们在思考如何利用自己的时间、才华以及精力时，并没有将人生的目标放在首要。

哈佛商学院每年从全球精英中招收900 位学员，其中很大一部分人几乎没思考过他们的人生目标，这实在令人震惊。我告诉他们，在哈佛商学院或许是他们最后一次有机会深入思考这个问题。

要是他们以为将来有更多时间和精力去思考这个问题，那就大错特错了，因为压力会越来越大：你要还贷款，每周工作70小时，还要结婚生子。

对我而言，有一个清晰的人生目标至关重要。

但想清楚这件事让我花了大量的时间和精力。在获得罗德奖学金后，我参加的课程要求非常严格，需要我在牛津的正常学习时间内，额外完成一年的学习量。我决定，每天晚上要花一个小时阅读、思考人生的价值和意义。

对我来说，想要坚持这个目标也颇具挑战，因为我在这上面多花一个小时，就意味着少一小时研究计量经济学等学科。我是否真的该从学习时间中抽出一小时？对此我十分矛盾，但这最终让我找到了我人生目标。

如果我没有这么做，而是将那一个小时用在学习最新的技能上，去研究回归分析的自相关性方面的问题，那就是糟糕地浪费了人生。计量经济学工具我一年也就用几次，但对人生的目标的理解却需要我每天去实践。

这是我学过的最有用的东西。我向学生承诺，如果他们能花些时间厘清他们人生的目标，多年以后回首往事时，会将此视为在哈佛商学院最宝贵的收获，如果他们找不到人生目标，他们的人生将会变成无舵的远航，还会在艰难旅途中遭遇重创。

弄清人生的目标比掌握作业成本分析法、平衡计分卡、核心竞争力、颠覆性创新、4P营销理论以及波特五力模型等知识更有意义。

选择追求一份职业并获得成功，仅仅是实现你人生目标的一种工具。然而若是没有目标，人生会变得空洞无物。

配置好你的资源

你如何配置你的时间、精力以及才华，决定了你的人生格局。

有很多事情在争夺我的这些资源：我想与妻子建立双方都满意的亲密关系，培养优秀的孩子，为社区做贡献，在事业上取得成功等等。我面临的难题和公司面临的一样：我的时间、精力、心智有限，该如何针对每项“任务”进行配置？

你的配置决定，有可能让你的人生变得和最初计划的截然不同。

我发现当人们极度渴望成功时，就会下意识地将自己额外的半小时或任何剩余的精力，用到能立竿见影带来成绩的行动上。比如你推出了一款产品，完成了一项设计，结束了一次演讲，做成了一笔交易，讲了一堂课，发表了一篇论文，拿到了报酬以及获得了升迁，这样的成绩都清晰可见。

然而，当你将时间和精力用于与配偶和孩子建立亲密关系时，却往往无法获得立竿见影的效果。

孩子们每天都有犯错的时候。你要等到20年后才能骄傲地说，“我培养了一个不错的孩子”。你可以忽视与配偶的关系，日复一日，似乎也看不出事情正在恶化。

那些追求卓越的人总是下意识地偏爱在工作中花费更多的时间和精力，而选择忽视家庭，即便与家人的亲密关系是他们获得幸福感的强大、持久的来源。

如何你深究一些商业灾难的根源，就会不断发现，当事人都有追求快速满足的倾向。如果从这个角度来审视他们的个人生活，会发现令人吃惊有发人深醒的规律：

在那些他们曾认为最重要的事情上，他们分配的资源越来越少。

避开“边际成本”错误

在财务和经济课上，我们都学过评估投资机会时运用的一条原则：忽略沉没成本和固定成本，依据每项投资产生的边际成本和边际收入来做决策。

我们从课程还学到，这一理念使得公司更偏向于押宝其过去取得成功的经验举措，而忽视了对未来所需能力的打造。如果未来一成不变，这种做法还可行。但如果未来发生变化，这种做法就是错误的。

实际上，未来几乎总是在变化。

这个理论解释了我和学生们讨论的第三个问题：如何做一个正直的人并避免牢狱之灾？

我们在面对人生中的善恶抉择时，经常会不经意地套用边际成本学说。有个声音会在我们的大脑中回荡：“我知道按道理我们不应该这么做，但是现在情况特殊，破个例也无妨。就这一次，不会有事的。”

怀着“就这一次”的侥幸心理做“错事”，看起来边际成本极低，因此有着难以抵抗的诱惑力。但它最终吞噬了你，让你忘记这条路最终通向何处，也忘记计算这项选择的全部成本有多高。

从理论上讲，我可以跨越一次红线，下不为例。但回头看来，抵挡住“情况特殊，破一次例也无妨”逻辑的诱惑，实在是我人生之中最为重要的决定之一。

为什么这样说？因为我们人生中出现“特殊情况”的时候没完没了啊。如果我那一次破了例，那么在以后的日子里，我就可能会一次又一次地无法坚守自我。

我从中得到的教训是，100%地信守原则远比98%地坚守原则容易。如果你基于边际成本分析，屈服于“就这一次”，那你就会像我那些身陷囹圄的同班同学那样，无比后悔自己的选择。

你必须明确所要坚守的原则，并为此设定安全线。

牢记谦逊的重要性

在这个世界上，怀有谦逊之心很重要。在你考入一流研究生院之前，你的全部所学几乎都来自那些比你更聪明、更有经验的人，比如你的父母、老师和老板。而当你从哈佛商学院或其他顶级学校结束学业后，你在工作中遇到的绝大多数人或许并不如你聪明。

如果你的态度是，只有聪明人才能教导你，你的学习机会将会受限。但如果你拥有谦逊的态度，愿意向每个人学习，你的学习机会将会源源不断。通常，只有你真的对自己感觉良好时才会表现出谦逊，你也会想要帮助身边的人提升他们的自尊感。

谦逊之人都有一个共同的特征：强烈的自尊感和尊重他人，他们清楚自己是谁，并对此感觉良好，有些人总是以一种傲慢无礼、颐指气使的方式对待别人，其实他们的粗暴行为恰恰说明他们缺乏自尊。这些人通过贬低他人来让自己感觉良好。

选择合适的标准

2009年我被诊断出罹患癌症，我的生命可能比预期的短。所幸治疗效果不错，看起来我不会提前结束生命。但这段经历让我对自己的人生进行了深刻的审视。

我很清楚，一些公司运用了我的研究成果，并获得了巨额收益，我知道自己产生了很大的影响。但这场疾病让我发现，那些重要影响对我而言恰恰微不足道，这真有趣。

我由此得出了结论：上帝评价我这一生过得如何的标准并不是赚了多少金钱，而是我真正能够影响多少人的人生。

我认为这个标准适用于每一个人。别在意你能取得多大成就，想想你能帮多少人变得更好吧。

我最后的忠告是：思考一下你人生的标准是什么，找到答案并下定决心每天坚持，这样当你的生命走到尽头时，你的人生就是成功的。

文章节选自：克莱顿·克里斯坦森 2010年7月哈佛大学毕业演讲克莱顿·克里斯坦森：“颠覆性创新之父”，哈佛商学院教授，五度荣获“麦肯锡最佳论文奖”，两度荣获《哈佛商业评论》Thinkers50 “当代50名最具影响力的商业思想家”第一名。著有《创新者的窘境》等全球畅销书。

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is…,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.

The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.

This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”

I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.

In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Choose the Right Yardstick

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.