How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton M. Christensen

Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career. 

He also has a TED talk [click here]

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.

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

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.

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.

What to Do If Your Boss Is Making Your Life Miserable

Ronda Suder

keep calm and carry on!

You can’t choose your boss, but you can choose how you react to a bad one. How to approach the situation with grace. 

It happens to the best of us—we start a new job only to find that our boss is not ideal. They might be a micromanager, a visionary that lacks the ability to get the job done, a boss who likes to take all the credit for their team’s good work, a poor communicator, a non-communicator, an absentee boss, and the list goes on.

In what might be the worst case scenario, your manager doesn’t like you or how you do your job no matter how hard you try, and you’re reminded of it on a regular basis—and yes, I know that the manager who is “out to get you” isn’t just a tall tale or exaggeration, but truly does exist in today’s world, because I’ve seen this type of manager in the workforce first hand. I’ve had employees call me in tears because of their boss’ belittling and immature behavior, being at their wits end in trying to make the situation work and asking for advice on what to do next. That’s why I’m not surprised that in a 5-year comparative study conducted by Lynn Taylor Consulting, seven out of 10, or 69 percent of Americans surveyed, agreed that there were similarities between toddlers with too much power and bosses with too much power.

Many managers are aware of the fact that they need to improve. Per a post on Inc.com, 64 percent of managers in a DDI study admitted they needed to acquire better management skills. To give managers a break, though, they often do have their hands full with the work that crosses their own desk and also feel the pressure of meeting the numbers, lots of goals, and then some. Couple these demands with the fact that many organizations promote managers for the wrong reasons—being good at your job tactically or technically does not mean you’ll be a good manager or leader—and organizations lack management and leadership training.

Regardless of why your boss might be less than ideal, you need to determine the best way to work with him or her, especially if leaving your current position isn’t an option (which it isn’t for many). Below are some tips on how to manage your boss, to help you evaluate your situation and get the support you need to be productive while maintaining your sanity.

Honestly evaluate the situation.

It can be tough to look in the mirror, but take an honest look and determine if there are items on your side of the table to work on that could help improve the relationship with your boss. Maybe you could be more efficient, meet deadlines better, and so on. If we’re slacking at work, we typically know it. At the same time, you might be doing the best you can and it’s still not good enough, so take a breath and read on.

Understand your boss’ issues and communication style.

The better versed you are in “emotional intelligence” and how to get along with others, the better positioned you’ll be to deal with tough situations like a difficult boss. Take note of how your boss works and try to meet him on his side of the fence when it comes to work and communication style. Doing so could make your life a lot easier. Travis Bradberry, author or Emotional Intelligence 2.0, gives some good insights on the various types of bad bosses and how to deal with him in his post “How Successful People Conquer Bad Bosses.”

Create a written record.

If your boss is always on your case about what you have or haven’t done or that you’re not meeting deadlines, be sure to keep a detailed written record of all of your work, from what to when to who, as well as any reasons as to why a project or item was delayed. You might also consider scheduling a daily meetup for five minutes or so to discuss what you’ve accomplished and to ensure you understand your manager’s priorities of your current task list. This keeps you both accountable and your boss in check. I advised one employee to take this approach, and it helped her maintain her sanity and provided her with a proof of record if her manager approached her about a perceived issue, like accusing her of missing a deadline when she had actually completed the task on time.

Don’t waste your energy on thinking about your miserable boss.

I’ve been fortunate to have some amazing managers during my career. Only once did I have a manager that was difficult to work with, to say the least. I was spending so much energy thinking about how frustrated he made me and what to do about it that I was wasting my energy on things I couldn’t control. If you find that you’re often upset or thinking about your boss, consider paying yourself a dollar each time you do it, and save the money for a rainy day. This trick will help you become aware of how much time you’re spending on your boss that you could be using for more productive and enjoyable endeavors! It will also allow you to shift your thoughts every time you think of him or her, so it doesn’t consume you.

Know that you did not do anything wrong if the situation doesn’t work out.

At the end of the day, some relationships simply don’t work well. It takes two to tango and only one to back out of the dance for the dance to fail. Do the best you can and focus on your work until a better scenario comes along.  

Take the high road.

Choose to act like an adult, even if your boss doesn’t, and don’t badmouth or gossip about him or her. It won’t help the situation. If you need to speak to someone within your organization because your work is being impeded or negatively impacted by the situation with your boss, do so professionally and discreetly.

Speak to someone in Human Resources.

This is especially true if the behavior of your manager borders harassment or makes you feel unsafe or uncomfortable. HR might also be able to advise you on how to best deal with a situation that you’re trying to make work.

Speak to your boss’ boss, or someone higher up in the organization that can help.

This can be a tricky situation, I know. You’ll need to use good judgment as to when to take this approach, as well as whether or not it will backfire on you. Most employees I speak with are more comfortable going to Human Resources first. Also, if you choose this approach, it’s best to go in with an “I’m having a difficult time in dealing with X and am looking for some guidance or suggestions as to how to improve the situation” instead of pointing the finger and blaming by saying something like, “My manager is wrong and difficult and making my life miserable.”

Refer to a career or personal coach or your mentor.

It can be helpful to speak with a career coach or mentor to vent, as well as seek advice and guidance on how to deal with a boss that’s making your work life difficult. Someone outside of the situation might be able to give you a perspective that will allow you to deal with the scenario better or even look at it differently. You can conduct an online search for career coaches to find local career and personal coaches, as well as coaches that conduct sessions via phone.

See the situation as a learning opportunity.

Consider the silver lining in a bad-boss situation to be the fact that you can learn what not to do to co-workers or employees if you’re ever a manager or supervisor one day.

In certain scenarios, we might not get to choose our boss, but we do get to choose how we react to the tough situations in our life. Being dealt a hand that includes a bad boss is not fun, but with the right mindset and approach, you can make it work until you’re able to move on to a better environment.

The So-Easy-It’s-Almost-Crazy Secret to Making Any Career Decision

by ADRIAN GRANZELLA LARSSEN

I’ve always been plagued by indecision. In one particularly illustrative example, my nine-year-old self broke down in tears in a shoe store having to decide between the purple hi-tops and the pink and green hi-tops. I just didn’t know which option would be the best way to kick off the fourth grade.

In my adult life, this has often come up in job-related decisions. I’ve spent weeks wringing my hands, tossing and turning, and endlessly contemplating: Should I work at this small agency with great people, or the larger one with better pay and name recognition? Should I take the new position, or hold out for a promotion at my current job? Should I stay in the city I love or move for a great career opportunity?

Of course, I utilize all of the tried-and-true methods: making long lists of pros and cons, talking things out with friends, making a choice and sleeping on it, and even taking a class on quantitative analysis (complicated Excel models most definitely included).

But in many situations, there’s no clear “right” answer, or even a best one. Which is why I really loved the advice I read recently from Inc.’s Jayson Demers. When faced with a particularly tough crossroads, he writes, try asking yourself: Who do I want to be?

As he explains:

Instead of thinking what you want to do, think about who you want to be. Picture how your identity will change as the result of your decision. Are you the type of person who works for a casual, laid-back company, or the type of person who makes more money and wears a suit every day? In a way, our decisions construct our identities, so use this strategy to help you figure out who you want to be.

Yes, it’s important to know and think about all of the practical pros and cons of any given option. It’s certainly valuable to consider the monetary benefits, growth potential, and happiness factor of each opportunity—and to understand the benefits and tradeoffs of each.

But if you’ve done that and you still aren’t clear, try going through this exercise. Grab a notebook, and write out the answer to: “Who do I want to be?” Think about yourself three years out (often, one year seems too soon and five years too far away), and describe the ideal version of your future self in as much detail as possible.

Then, ask yourself: “Will the job opportunity—or opportunities—I’m considering get me closer or further away from that person?” Your answer just may be crystal clear.

If not, and if you’re comfortable doing so, this can be a great exercise to do with a friend. Talk through who you want to be and describe how each option would get you there (or not). Other people can often uncover messages that we miss, or even pick up revealing cues that we can’t read, like body language, tone of voice, or nervous habits.

No, asking yourself who you want to be isn’t easy. But in the long run, it’s the question that will get you closer to the right answer—and to the life that you really want to live.

Oh, and I decided I was a pink and green hi-tops girl. Haven’t looked back since.

You Don’t Need to Have Your Whole Life Figured Out Right Now

By Armando Quintana

“On any one day you can massively change the direction of your life.” ~Jim Rohn

Have you ever felt as though you needed to have your whole life figured out right now?

When we’re young, we are often encouraged to consider the same common careers such as being a police officer, firefighter, doctor, lawyer, or teacher. Then in high school, we feel pressure to make a decision because we’ll have to major in something in college.

We may love music, writing, or something that people associate with struggle, only to get bombarded by advice to do something that will make money.

People constantly ask us what we are going to do with our lives. The pressure on all of us is huge.

In college, this pressure only increases, because with a major, now everyone wants to know what you’re going to do with it. For example, I majored in sports medicine and Hispanic studies, and people would constantly ask me about my plans. When I said I wanted to be a physician, there was even more pressure from people. This creates stress and anxiety, and can push someone toward burning out.

There is a certain expectation that we need to pick a traditional career path, especially when we speak to older individuals who chose a career and stayed there until retirement.

The older I get, the more I realize there are many things I want to accomplish in this life, and I have no desire to stick to one career and be defined by it.

There are parts of me that are strategic, other parts that are itching for me to take crazy risks, and others that tell me I want to be the best doctor. There are so many things to fulfill that I am not quite sure what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I know there are other people who feel the same way. If that’s you, I want you to know that…

It’s okay to not know what you want to do, or to have a plan for a lifelong career.

There is time. Time to look at different careers and do as we please. No longer do we have to follow the traditional route of getting a job right away and sticking to that one job right for the rest of our lives. If we want to change, there is a way to do it.

After graduating from college, I traveled around Europe, took some classes, worked in the entertainment industry, and grew as an individual as I was exposed to different areas of life.

I met many different types of people who all provided different perspectives. The amount of learning and knowledge that I absorbed throughout these meetings was more than I could have gotten from any type of formal education.

Currently having my vision set on being a physician is great. I love medicine, and as of now, I want to be a doctor. However, I am not defined by my title of physician, because later on I may change careers. I may decide it’s time to open a business or join a jazz band and travel the United States.

I’m not sure what I will be doing for the rest of my life, but I know that if I continuously remind myself to have a smile on my face, I will be happy.

You don’t need to worry about other people’s opinions.

One of the things I struggle with is worrying about what other people think. The majority of people I met while working at a hospice center told me they were not afraid of failure or afraid of doing what they truly wanted with their life; they were afraid of what people would think of them.

This was eye-opening, because I realized how often we limit ourselves based on what other people say we should do, and that their opinions don’t matter because they are not living our lives.

The people who tell you no and criticize are often the ones who are not following their own dreams. They may have been knocked down by not succeeding and may have become jaded by the world. You don’t have to live your life based on what they say.

When I tell people that being a doctor is only a fraction of what I will accomplish in my lifetime, more than half of them make a comment or show through their body language that they don’t believe in my plan.

It’s frustrating how even the people closest to me do not support some of my views on life, and they make sure to let me know it. I am still learning to not be affected by this because it’s challenging, but I urge you to do the same.

Tell more and more people about what you want to do with your life because then it will become your truth, which will make it much easier to stick to your plan.

At the beginning of my undergraduate career, there were over 100 people interested in the pre-medical track. By the end of my college experience, there were around twenty who were still dedicated to the pursuit of medical school.

Time and time again, people told us how hard it was going to be, the sacrifices we were going to have to make, and how there were always people better than us. Those opinions discouraged the majority of my peers. As hard as it has been, sticking through it has been the most rewarding experience ever.

You can create a worthwhile future while enjoying the moment.

When we get wrapped up in believing we need to know what we’re going to do, we can lose sight of the present. I know many people who are constantly worried about the future. They’re afraid things won’t work out, and they never truly live in the moment.

We need to think about the future in order to create it, but we can actually do that most effectively when we focus primarily on the present.

People who diet often talk in terms of the future and how much weight they need to lose, but if they were to focus solely on the day and what needed to get done, before they know it, the results would show!

This kind of focus can be challenging, as this requires us to engage in positive habits every day in order to find success in what we desire.

However, when we become conscious of what we must do every day, we can then relax knowing that in due time, the results of our consistency will show.

It’s okay to not know what you want to do for the rest of your life. I see a negative stigma associated with people who do not have a clear plan for their career path, but there’s nothing wrong with going with the flow and allowing yourself to grow, evolve, and change.

What is life if you make it to the end and do not have any exciting, crazy memories to look back on and remember with a smile on your face?

We should all go out and explore many different fields to see what we truly love—and we may need to do this several times throughout our lives.

Whether it’s working from a remote location, working with children, or becoming a missionary, do it all and see what you like best!

At any time we can change the course of our lives. It might not always be easy, but all we have to do is put one foot forward, knowing we’re creating a change that will bring us more joy in life.