We have recommended many books over the years to our clients at Stearns Financial, most having to do with finances, business topics, leadership or career reinvention. A new one that we like is a bit different-with topics that sound more like they come from a self-help book. But the serious issues it addresses are right in our clients' sweet spot. It's Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life?

Many clients ask how they can be successful and happy in their careers when the world is constantly changing and life throws them curve balls. They want to know how they can regain their balance and find enduring happiness and keep their moral compass pointed at true north as people around them practice situational ethics.

Our profession has its share of leaders in financial life planning and behavioral finance, including George Kinder, Carol Anderson, Susan Bradley, Mitch Anthony and Ed Jacobson. Among them is Christensen, who has been one of our favorite authors, with best-selling books on innovation and health-care business models. He teaches a graduate level course at the Harvard Business School, is co-founder of four companies and was named the world's most influential business thinker in 2011 by Thinkers50, a biennial ranking of management sages.

In 2010, Christensen faced difficulties that forced him to re-examine life and ask tough questions. He developed and successfully fought the same cancer that ended his father's life. At a Harvard Business School reunion, he noticed that behind the façades of many successful people in his class something was wrong. They weren't happy, or their marriages or families were in trouble. And some had even landed in jail.

Christensen set out to write about what makes the difference in success and failure in our lives, not just in business. What is stunning about How Will You Measure Your Life? is that Christensen has taken the groundbreaking ideas from his MBA class at Harvard, "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise," and adapted them to predict how our personal lives will turn out according to the different decisions we make and actions we pursue. Solving the complex challenges in our lives (and those of our clients) requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen.

The book contains sections with names such as "What Makes Us Tick?" and "Balancing Calculation Versus Serendipity." These parts offer many useful insights into career and business development. The difference between success and failure, especially in our world of turbo-charged changes, means making key decisions in a blender-trying to confront problems and opportunities as they arise while at the same time making deliberate plans and strategies.

Christensen offers several fascinating insights. One is that 93% of all companies that ultimately became successful had to abandon their original strategy because it wasn't viable. Careers often work the same way. Can you spot the moment when you need to make a critical change?

He also points out that the danger for high achievers is they will unconsciously allocate their scarce resources (personal time, energy, talent and wealth) to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. If a marriage or personal friendship seems to be going along fine, they will allocate fewer resources to it until it becomes a problem area, often when it is too late. What "job" do your closest relationships in life need you to do?

Christensen finds that many American businesses have outsourced their way to mediocrity. And "personal outsourcing" is also fashionable: With the best intentions, each new generation of parents hand their children off to myriad coaches and tutors, thinking this will better prepare them for the future. But is it what they really need?

No one sets out to ruin their life through unethical or illegal actions, Christensen says, yet many would-be champions in every field of endeavor fall from grace. Failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem to have high stakes attached. How can you steady a moral compass that is being constantly affected by people and situations around you?

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