This five-step personal strategic planning exercise applies best practices from the business world to your life.
Updated: 20 November, 2023One of my favorite books I’ve read recently is How Will You Measure Your Life?
In it, Harvard Business School strategy guru Clayton Christensen applies his world-renowned theories to the business of living a good life. He looks to get to the bottom of this question:
Why have so many CEOs he’s known succeeded at business but run their personal lives to the ground?
The biggest reason: Self-help-ing yourself is way more boring than making billions. Big shot CEOs strategize business moves in meetings all day long, but never bother to fit any semblance of a personal strategic plan into their schedule. Eventually, their lives go kaput.
Christensen convinced me to try not to make the same mistake. So I followed the advice from his book and others like it—The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, especially—to devise a personal strategic plan of my own.
I call it the “GPS” (general personal strategy).
It’s a five-step template that’s helped me figure out how to redirect my life toward not billions of dollars but more anti-regrets and an enjoyably fulfilling life.
To maximize My Life’s returns to (Step 1), I will optimize for (Step 2) and do some good by battling (Step 3). To do so more productively, I will release my handbrake of (Step 4.1) and replace it with (Step 4.2). And I am starting work on all of this immediately by (Step 5).
I like the perspective of looking at your life as if you’re the CEO of Your Life, Inc. You’re the head honcho responsible for delivering results to my shareholders.
Who are your shareholders?
Unless you got a bit ahead of yourself with the whole NFT craze and sold shares of yourself online, I’d argue your shareholders aren’t other people. Not even your kids or wife.
Your shareholders are future versions of you.
Imagine each Future You for every day left in your life has one voting share. They want themselves and the people they care about to be happy. Then ask yourself:
What action would the largest number of your thousands of shareholders vote in favor of?
Keep in mind that your shareholders understand what you’re incapable of. They won’t expect you to change the world in a day. Plus, they don’t want you to work so hard that it makes them miserable when it’s their turn to take the reins.
Today, it’s your turn. To be a better CEO, just try to be less selfish and more shareholder-friendly. Then tomorrow, it’s up to the next version of you to take over and do the same.
Ok, so you want to maximize long-term returns to your future selves, a.k.a. your shareholders.
What KPI (key performance indicator) are you using to measure how good or bad of a job you’re doing?
Consider this chart roughly approximating your life’s performance to date:
Your “Max Potential” is the absolute highest return you could possibly deliver to your shareholders in your lifetime. Time is your x-axis. And the big question is:
What’s your y-axis?
Happiness? Balance? Sense of community? Freedom? Buckets of Häagen-Dasz consumed?
There’s no easy answer. There’s not even a definitively correct answer. But it shouldn’t be too hard for you to come up with something better than what our monkey minds default to: money, sex, and power.
Even a rough KPI for your y-axis will help you make better long-run decisions. When in doubt, use it to ask yourself:
What action will direct me higher up my y-axis?
For example, I think my y-axis is “Growth.” So, by prioritizing growth over money, I decided to challenge myself to write this post instead of some money-grubbing article like, “Why starting a blog by using all these affiliate links will get you the passive-income life of your dreams.”
This personal strategic planning step is triply counterintuitive, so lots of people skip it or screw it up.
Counter-intuition #1: To enjoy life, you need to struggle.
Without conflict, the story of your life will have no plot. And, as Donald Miller puts it in one of my favorite “sledgehammer” books, “If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”
To make matters worse, if you don’t pick your struggles, struggles you don’t want will find you.
Counter-intuition #2: Happiness doesn’t come from trying to make yourself happy but as a by-product of helping others get happier.
This is called the Hedonistic Paradox.
My favorite question for dealing with it and figuring out in what way you can help yourself by helping others is this:
What’s an injustice in the world that pisses you off and you’re willing and able to take on?
Counter-intuition #3: The best battles to pick are the ones you cannot win.
Rather than pick some dragon to slay, mountain to climb, or step-mom to hate, lick your finger, stick it in the air, and look for a headwind. It probably won’t ever stop blowing in your face, but you can harness it to make meaningful progress against it while enjoying the ride.
My battle, for example, is with the status quo and the social pressures and forces of complacency that support it. I’ll never defeat the status quo, but I’ve been having a wicked good time taking it on so far. And I like to think some people have benefitted from it.
What do you think your battle could be?
