There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
Clayton M. ChristensenRead
Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not.
Interpretation
Understanding motivation helps us recognize the reasons behind our actions and influences our enjoyment of them.
This quote by Clayton M. Christensen emphasizes the critical role that motivation plays in shaping our actions and overall satisfaction in life. By understanding what drives us, we can better navigate our choices and enhance our experiences, leading to a more fulfilling life.
In practice
This quote can inspire a team to reflect on their motivations during a meeting.
There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.
By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out. Usually, what you wish for doesn't fall in your lap; it falls somewhere nearby, and you have to recognize it, stand up, and put in the time and work it takes to get to it. This isn't because the universe is cruel. It's because the universe is smart. It has its own cat-string theory and knows we don't appreciate things that fall into our laps.
When I was really young, I busted my nose when I was racing. The first thing my dad asked me was: 'Are you OK?' I said, 'Can you fix the car for tomorrow?' And I won the race the next day.
It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
When I was young, my father used to say, ‘If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.’ I thought about these words during my journey, and they kept me moving even when I didn’t know where I was going. Those words became the vehicle that drove my spirit forward and made it stay alive.
Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.