RWL #160 - how to live your life
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Busy week up here in the north country. We’re interviewing candidates for a faculty position and it’s taken up a bunch of my time. It’s exciting to think about having a new teammate. Adding the right person to your team can make all the difference between work being a drag and work being exciting and meaningful.
This week’s links are a mix, but they all have a common thread of how to live your life. Check them out!
(picture above is an illustration for the Read section)
Have a great week and do amazing things!
Read
What: Alice N. Persons, Meadowbrook Nursing Home
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2007%252F08%252F29.html
Why: I keep books of poetry in the bathroom. It’s one of my excentricities. If you had come to my house any time in the last five years, you would have seen a copy of Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places on the shelf of the main floor bathroom. It takes a long time to read if you only read one poem at a time. As I was coming to the end, I came across this poem. It has a nice mix of melancholy and affirmation, and a reminder of how to live your life. You can also listen to Garrison Keillor read it, which is also a treat - he has such a wonderful voice.
Watch
What: Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life? (19 minutes)
https://tedxboston.org/speaker/christensen-1
Why: Clayton Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor, and the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. He popularized the idea of disruption in the business literature. He died this past week. Not only did I admire his work and its impact on the world, I discovered as I read about him that he was a deeply spiritual person, and lived a mission of trying to help other people be better. To me he was something of a rock star, except without the drugs and other bad behavior. He lived an ideal that showed you could be a decent human being and be successful in the business world - two values popular culture often tries to prove are mutually exclusive. I was very sad to hear of his passing. I believe I have shared this video before, but I’m going to share it one more time because it’s worth listening to.
I’ve transcribed the end of the video below. Read it, then listen to him say it.
“God doesn’t employ accountants because he has an infinite mind. He doesn’t need to aggregate up above the level of individuals… When I have my interview with God at the end of my life, he’s not going to ask me to show him how high I rose in anyone’s org chart or how much money I left behind in the bank. He’s going to say, “Now Clay, I put you in that circumstance, now can we talk about the individual people whose lives you helped become better people because you worked with them, or they were members of your family, or you just met them and they needed your help. And then Clay, I stuck you in this situation, now let’s talk about the individual people whose lives you blessed because you used the talents I gave you to help them. And I realized that is the way God will measure my life - by the individual people whose lives I blessed. It’s really important for you to succeed at the things you are working at, but that isn’t going to be the measure of your life. God doesn’t count. He doesn’t aggregate. He’s going to assess you on how well you helped other people be better people.”
Listen
What: Econtalk, Daniel Klein on Honest Income
https://www.econtalk.org/daniel-klein-on-honest-income/
Why: In this podcast, economist Russ Roberts interviews economist Dan Klein about his recent paper, Is It Just to Pursue Honest Income? Dan has been thinking and writing about economic justice for many years. He was my dissertation adviser and I wrote my dissertation on the topic as well. This discussion actually fits well with Christensen’s talk because Dan is asking if it is OK to spend your life working. The answer, it might surprise you given it’s coming from an economist, is maybe not. That maybe not actually comes with a lot of qualifications. Of course you should work, you shouldn’t be a burden on society, but you also should find some balance because to work to the exclusion of all else is an unbecoming use of what is yours. The argument grows out of the writings of the great moral philosopher and economist, Adam Smith. The whole thing is worth listening to.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau