Affection is not about what you do it is about who you are. Unlike monuments that can be built unlike intelligence, which can be faked learning to love your frail friends and dysfunctional family requires tolerance and generosity. How will you measure you life? By increasing the surface area of the people you love. Who will come to your birthday when you turn 80? Who will you invite to be with you when you have little to gain and nothing to prove? As I saw this year with five sathabhishekams, it will be those people who are part of you the people you love. They were a broader version of that vaunted Indian stereotype: the joint family. The people who attended my father-in-law’s 80th birthday were not the spectrum of political contacts he had made during his years in Delhi. It is about what author Katrina Kenison calls “The Gift of the Ordinary Day". It is about small pleasures, rich relationships and the ability to make peace with your soul. Life for many of us is not about artistic genius or business impact. But what of average lives that cannot be measured through achievement either in the material or artistic sense? The East plumbs inward to chart and measure growth of the self the West measures external impact. Hokusai’s measure of his life in terms of the integrity of his art was every bit as lofty and ambitious as Andrew Carnegie’s desire to build steel plants and cultural institutions. I have read similar quotes from Hindustani musicians in Sheila Dhar’s wonderful book Raga n’ Josh: Stories From a Musical Life, in which singers aim for honesty and integrity in every musical phrase they essay. “At 100, I will make real wonders and at 110, every point, every line, will have a life of its own," said Hokusai. He was cultivating the self aiming for the divine.Ī quote attributed to him at the end of his life says that none of the pictures he had produced till age 70 had any merit. But Hokusai wasn’t aiming for immortality when he created that beautiful woodblock print in Prussian blue. His print The Great Wave off Kanagawa is among the most recognizable pieces of Japanese art. When the Japanese artist Hokusai created the woodblock print that would become a Japanese art icon nearly 200 years later, he didn’t know he was creating a legacy. Legacy in this business context is usually built or engineered, but in the art world, it can often be an accident. How will you measure your life? For the educated elite, and certainly those graduating from Harvard Business School, where Christensen teaches, a good measure of a life well-lived would be impact and legacy: building an institution, affecting countless lives, making enough wealth to pass on to future generations, improving the world. My scepticism of self-help books such as Christensen’s doesn’t, however, detract from the seductiveness of its title. What about the rest of us? What about the average person who doesn’t have the intellect to be a Rhodes Scholar the faith and the discipline to meditate an hour a day at age 20-something or the means to do any of the above? Each phrase in the previous sentence delineates Christensen as an exceptional person. He says that he spent an hour a day during his year as a Rhodes Scholar meditating and praying about the purpose of his life. He earned the right to write this book through intense introspection, which arguably is the only way to gain wisdom. The best way is to follow Christensen’s own approach.
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