Governing Values

This week’s lesson was based on Clayton Christensen’s article in the Harvard Business Review titled “How Will You Measure Your Life?” In this article, Clayton Christensen asks three important, introspective questions:

1. How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and family become an enduring source of happiness?
3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

These three questions were questions that Christensen posed to his HBS students at the end of the semester to help them think about how to find meaning and fulfillment in their own lives. I really appreciated the examples Clayton Christensen shared from his own life on how he personally answers these questions.

One of the assignments from the lesson this week asked us to create a Personal Constitution. A Personal Constitution is a document that contains governing values that provide a foundation for our lives. These governing values are values or personal qualities that you highly value. Some of the qualities I wrote down were honesty, righteousness, love, and trustworthiness. Then, based on these qualities I down “I am” statements about each of them to help reinforce that I want to become a person that demonstrates those qualities. I then created long term and short term goals that started with “I will” to help me achieve my goal of becoming a person that displays those governing values. I found this exercise to be really educational and helped me personally answer the questions that were posed by Clayton Christensen.