You don’t need a person to directly mentor you for them to have an outsized impact on your life.

One person who has had an immeasurable impact on the trajectory of my life is the late Clayton Christensen, and I only directly spoke to him a handful of times.

During my final two years of undergrad, I was a researcher at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as well as Stanford’s Medical School.  Every week I’d read dozens of business cases and articles, many of them coming out of HBS.

That’s when I feel in love with the mind of Clayton Christensen. 

His writing and teaching was unlike anything I’d encountered before.  Papers from most professors were only theory driven and often impractical for the real world.  Papers from many real world business leaders centered too much on squeezing out profit to the detriment of family and one’s sanity.

Clay’s writing in formal research papers and his less formal articles in business magazines were a forward-thinking combination of groundbreaking business frameworks and practical life advice. Not only did he write about these things, but digging deeper into who he was as a person you saw that he truly lived these lessons.  I hadn’t encountered that before in the field of business.

It was life changing.

Years later, when I was doctoral student at HBS and he was a tenured faculty member, I mostly only saw peeks of him here and there around campus.  I revered him from afar, only having the guts to speak with him a few times.  If I had known then that he would soon be battling leukemia, I would probably have quieted my fears of looking stupid and gone to his office more often to soak up his knowledge and presence. 

Clay was a fantastic professor and, fortunately for the world, he left a small library of books, papers, articles, and an institute to continue his tutelage.  One of my all-time favorite reference books for creating the type of life I want to live is his book How Will You Measure Your Life?

How Will You Measure Your LIfe? presents a framework for successfully navigating three core life questions:

1. How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career?
2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
3. How can I be sure that I will live a life of integrity – and stay out of jail?

In some ways the book is autobiographical.  He uses many examples from his own life and experiences.  But in more actionable terms, what I truly love about How Will You Measure Your Life? is that it presents frameworks to apply when confronted with life-altering questions, ethical dilemmas, and seemingly unimportant decisions on how to allocate your time.

I like to read this book once every year or two, and I may come back to specific chapters if I’m facing a particularly challenging or uncertain period.  It’s definitely worth taking at least a cursory read through.  

Below I’ll leave you with some of the sentences that I still have highlighted in my iBooks copy of the book.

On being intentional

On motivation

On family