Measuring Your Career Success

“Life is a lesson, you learn it when you’re through.” - Limp Bizkit

There are things in life we can’t judge until we go through them, perhaps even get near the end of the process. Retirement, long term health, and even the measure of your career success.

There was a piece in the CNN Money that interviewed Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School. It’s about a new book, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” and it talks about the work you do in career and in life and how they should relate.

In the piece, there’s a great paragraph:

“I believe that the source of our deepest happiness comes from investments we make in intimate relationships with our spouse, children, and close friends. But if you measure your life by how much money you make or where you go in a hierarchy, you invest more and more to maximize those things and less and less of your time and energy on family. Even though you think family is important, you invest in things that are counter to what you had intended to do in your heart. ”

There’s more about career and what you should think about as you try to grow your career and move forward.

This site, and the talk I give focuses on the things you can do to improve your career and find happiness, but I’m not sure I emphasize the balance enough.

I think it’s important that you continue to work on your career, in almost any field. Find time to work on professional development, learn more, but keep it in balance.

Life is short.

Remember that you want to focus on what’s important, and often the really important stuff isn’t in your career. It’s outside of work.