How Will You Measure Your Life

How Will You Measure Your Life shows you how to sustain motivation at work and in life to spend your time on earth happily and fulfilled, by focusing not just on money and your career, but your family, relationships and personal well-being.

Do you sometimes avoid going to family birthdays? Have you ever felt happy some important work thing happened right at the same time, and gave you a good excuse not to go?

Deep in our hearts, you and I know that the relationships with the people closest to us – our best friends and family – are the biggest source of our happiness. So why don’t we always dedicate the time they need to them?

There are two reasons for this:

Working more presents an immediate reward. It’s really easy to see the benefit of an extra hour at work – you’ll do something that’ll advance your career and make you more money. Those who you have your best relationships with never ask for your time. That’s why they’re the best! They just support you, no matter what you do. So they don’t ask for much.

In a sense, great relationships are a paradox: they need consistent dedication and lots of effort, even when it seems like they don’t.

It might seem like you can compensate less family time now for more later, but the truth is damage done early can hardly be repaired in later years.

So what’s one thing you can do to instantly improve your relationships and give them the attention they deserve? How about treating them like a job?

Wait, what?! Yup, that’s right! Ironically, thinking of your relationships like you do about the thing you’re supposed to give up a bit of – work – will actually make you better at them.

Here’s the single-best question you can ask to improve any relationship: “What job does X need me to do the most?”

X is the person in question. Could be your best friend, your dad, your family as a whole, or your partner. This flips the relationship on its head, approaching it from their perspective, instead of yours, and forces you to dig deep. It helps understand the other party better and then come up with good ways to fulfill their needs.

The more often you do this, the better you’ll become at intuitively guessing what your spouse or son needs, which is a great recipe for a flourishing and loyal relationship.

One relationship we mustn’t neglect in all this is the one you have with yourself. A really easy way to protect it at all times is to live with integrity. If your conscience is clear, you’ll feel good about decisions…