Down to Business (pt.2)

It was a Sunday evening in the FTTA, and I was sifting through a stack of periodicals at Barnes & Noble. One article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) caught my eye. Each year a panel selects the top articles from HBR and these become the Annual McKinsey Award Winners. So I was curious which article the McKinsey & Company panel had selected. Turns out the top article for 2010 is "How Will You Measure Your Life" by Clayton M. Christensen; it came from a speech given by Christensen to the 2010 graduating class at Harvard Business School. I want to highlight and apply a couple of excerpts, but you can view the full article here. 

Clayton M. Christensen is a distinguished professor at Harvard Business School, and if you read the above links you may appreciate this article more. But what really impressed me was the testimony of his experience as a student:

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra yearʼs worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasnʼt studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Because I was raised in a Christian home and in college became very active student with the Christian Students club at UGA, this story touched me very much. How many college students spend an hour each day to muse upon the Word and consider the meaning of our human life? Do you allocate an hour each day to such a cause? Are you a Rhodes scholar at Oxford? That's probably more difficult than my upcoming semester in graduate school. Yet Christensen was able to allocate an hour each day to something he believed in. Later in the article there is a subheading that says "Choose the right yardstick." Here he expounds:

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than Iʼd planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if Iʼll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life. 

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know Iʼve had a substantial impact. But as Iʼve confronted this disease, itʼs been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. Iʼve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isnʼt dollars but the individual people whose lives Iʼve touched.

I think thatʼs the way it will work for us all. Donʼt worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success

If we consider today what yardstick we want to be measured by, we may determine that what really matters is not how people judge us, but how much of what we do has eternal value in God's eyes (take a look at 1 Corinthians 4:1-5). This really touches me, and as I head back to school want my time be allocated according to the highest meaning in the universe. I hope many of us would take this pattern and dedicate some time, even an hour each day, to dive into the Bible and get with other Christian students to explore the meaning of our human existence. 

And to me this is what ties these two excerpts together. If we are faithful to know God and through the Bible come to know the purpose of our life, automatically the lives of people around us will be changed. So tonight I want to challenge you with the same question: How will you measure your life?