by Amelia Peterson
A couple of years ago Clayton Christensen, guru on the principles of successful business innovation, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled, ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’. The piece sets out the guidance Christensen gave to the HBS class of 2010 about principles for success in their personal lives.
Last year, Matthew Killingsworth, a PhD student in Daniel Gilbert’s lab at the Harvard Psychology department presented as part of his dissertation research a new method to study ‘happiness’: he asked people at the end of each day to think back over their activities and respond for each, ‘if you could ‘fast forward’ through that activity, would you?’. Killingsworth found that on average, respondents would choose not to experience over half of their day.
The continuing popularity of Christensen’s article (which soon became a book) and the interest in questions such as Killingsworth’s is a reminder of our interest as a culture in evaluating the success our lives. I was reminded of these pieces last weekend by a New York Times post from a mother fretting about her child’s high school course choices. The writer, Hope Perlman, was angst-ridden, she explained, because “[her] goal as a parent is to raise successful kids” – and she was worried about how their choices now might affect their chances of particular kinds of success down the road. For, she admitted with the ‘candor’ perfected by NYT parent bloggers, alongside the wish for her children to be “well-rounded and humane” she holds another wish: “for them to achieve: top of their classes, admission to top colleges and therefore (this is my fantasy) assured jobs and material success.”
It turns out that Perlman has a whole blog dedicated to finding the meaning of ‘success’. I came across it while waiting for my ride at the end of day two of the Project Zero/Good Work conference on the subject of ‘Developing responsible, caring and balanced youth’. If being ‘successful’ remains a powerful life goal for so many, then those of us concerned by questions of ‘balance’ and ‘responsibility’ have a task: to ensure that success is not just a zero-sum status game but one that entails caring and fulfillment. Which brings me to my initial question: what does it mean to be successful?
On the final morning of that same conference, we were offered something by way of an answer from, unsurprisingly, the articulate mind of Howard Gardner. The question we should be asking ourselves, he said, is how can we spend time well? You can find a longer development of Howard’s ideas in this Cognoscenti post, but one way of thinking about it is: what if we were all part of Killingsworth’s study and thought at the end of each day – how much of that would I have fast forwarded, and how much was really worthwhile?
So what does it look like to be doing something worthwhile? In that same conference panel we heard veteran educator Ron Berger describe his 28 years creating beautiful work with his students. I expect ‘elementary school teacher’ is not quite the career Hope Perlman has in mind for her children. However, I believe that if she had heard Ron on that morning she would not have been worried about the low status or pay of the position. His enthusiasm for his work is compelling. Here, quite clearly, is a man who is able to spend his time as he chooses.
Quite universally I think, we value the power of this kind of autonomy. It is therefore bizarre the extent to which we have allowed it to fall away as a criterion of success. Our societal vision of success is one where the figure of your annual salary (or rather, your bonus) has become the arbiter of value, as opposed to what kind of quality of life you manage to achieve in your waking hours.
Think how different it would be if we brought to the centre of our idea of success, how we spend our time. The outlook does not invite past blanket statements about what kinds of activities or careers are, and are not, worth pursuing. Spreadsheets, coding, or endless meetings might be absolutely how some people would choose to spend their time, particularly if the activities form part of a larger sense of what they are doing with their lives and why. Yet for others, a lens that valued well-spent time might emphasize that they are far from successful by this account, and perhaps the only attraction of their field is the lingering sense of status attached to their hard won position. Making spent time our arbiter of value could also help us acknowledge the inequity at the lower end of the pay scale – if we valued human time more highly, we would have the proper response to the situation of those forced to work more than eight hours a day to acquire a liveable wage.
What this lens prioritizes is an experiential as opposed to goal-orientated way of looking at value, meaning and purpose. Both lenses are of course important – the value of a particular experience of spent time can vary depending on associated goals – but a focus on goals alone can lead to a skewed picture of how to live ones life. A picture that is liable to reduce the importance of attending to minor day-to-day matters that are not attached to a goal, such as the quality of interpersonal interactions. Overall, therefore, the time spent lens can help us to raise to its proper place something that is vital if we intend to be and develop more caring and responsible people: due attention to how we treat others. This focus simply does not fit well with a life orientated towards traditional conceptions of success, where achievement of goals trumps any time-bound or experiential concern. If someone is trying to achieve time-well-spent, however, then time spent engaging with others – or even just passing through a respectful interaction – never feels wasted, because human connection is simply the thing none of us can get enough of.
So along with what Christensen and Killingworth would say to Hope Perlman about how to help her children life a good life, we might add the words of Samuel Johnson: “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”