How Will You Measure Your Life?

strategy—whether in companies or in life—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.

It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.

Ironically, it is for this reason that many unhappy marriages are often built upon selflessness. But the selflessness is based on the partners giving each other things that they want to give, and which they have decided that their partner ought to want—as in, “Honey, believe me, you are going to love this Iridium wireless telephone!”

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

The first source is anticipated opportunities—the opportunities that you can see and choose to pursue. In Honda’s case, it was the big-bike market in the United States. When you put in place a plan focused on these anticipated opportunities, you are pursuing a deliberate strategy. The second source of options is unanticipated—usually a cocktail of

If we ask the right questions, the answers generally are easy to get.

other words, strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something decided, say, in a meeting of top managers based on the best numbers and analysis available at the time. Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process.

“What job does my spouse most need me to do?”

The conclusion we reached was that going to school is not a job that children are trying to get done. It is something that a child might hire to do the job, but it isn’t the job itself. The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends—every day. Sure, they could hire school to get these jobs done. Some ac