Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life

Tierney had to learn how to “exert influence as opposed to control” and how to manage “by remote control,” as he told me.23 It was a challenging time.

This is an example of what psychologists call job crafting: the process of molding your work tasks and relationships to better fit your life.

The Center for Army Lessons Learned defines the commander’s intent as “a clear and concise expression of the purpose of the operation and the desired military end state that supports mission command, provides focus to the staff, and helps subordinate and supporting commanders act to achieve the commander’s desired result without further order, even

but they also list examples of how she and her husband have learned to focus on the things that matter, accept less than perfection on the things that don’t, and be creative when being pulled in different directions. Building a solid foundation for sharing domestic responsibilities involved, for example, her husband conjuring a way to move his new

Learning requires mistakes and reflection on those mistakes. So prepare to do some thinking about yourself and your world. Accelerating your growth in a skill requires looking back as much as you can at what works and what doesn’t. You really cannot take intelligent new action toward important goals without looking back a little.

see things from the point of view of mutual gains

Tierney, who kept asking himself, “What is my life about? What’s my legacy?” “He’s on my short list of heroes,” said Tierney of Gardner, adding that Gardner’s questions “gave me courage to follow my path.”

But she would come to realize that the hardest part about Princeton was getting in and that, she believed, her classmates from fancy prep schools weren’t any smarter than she was. She

was that a fulfilling life does not consist of three separate serial phases in which you learn, then you earn, and then you serve. “The fact is,” he said in a 2008 interview, “you ought to be learning continuously. You earn, but you earn in different ways and different amounts.” He then added a rhetorical question: “Why does serving wait until you’