If you read only one book this year, let it be this one

Back in August last year I had published a post about an inspirational book I had just finished reading.

I was so impressed with the thoughtful advice — and thought-provoking ideas — offered by Clayton M. Christensen and his co-authors in How Will You Measure Your Life? that I wanted everyone I know, especially my students, to read it. (That post — "Reading this book will change your approach to life" — continues to be among the most popular on this blog.)

Recently, I was asked to review the book for the August-September 2013 issue of Books & More.

Here is the review (based partly on my original post) in its entirety:

A life changer

Book: How Will You Measure Your Life?: Finding Fulfillment
Using Lessons from Some of the World’s Greatest Businesses
Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, with James Allworth and Karen Dillon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 206
Price: Rs. 299 (Flipkart)

IT IS RARE to find two people separated by some forty years in age raving about the same book.

When I wrote about How Will You Measure Your Life? on my blog some time ago, one of my students, Archita Nadgouda, who is in her twenties, wrote to say, “I cannot thank you enough for recommending this book to us! This was just the book I needed at this point of time when I’m embarking on a new relationship and planning a new career.” A few days later, Patrick Michael, executive editor of Dubai’s Khaleej Times who will soon be turning 60, posted his comments: “This is a must-read book for all, especially those starting out in life.”

On second thought, however, I am not surprised that both Archita and Patrick were entranced by what How Will You Measure Your Life? has to offer.

Like me — and like you — they must have asked themselves these universal questions many times over the years:

• How can I be sure that I will find satisfaction in my career?
• How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness?
• How can I avoid compromising my integrity?

Unbelievable as it sounds, How Will You Measure Your Life? not only provides the answers to these questions but also explains, with the help of real-life examples, how we can find fulfillment.

Slim in size but big on ideas, this book does not claim to offer simplistic answers. Instead, as in the introductory chapter, it provides insightful illustrations of how the theories this book propounds can help us in our lives. We first learn that people often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. “But this,” the authors tell us, “is like driving a car looking only at the rear-view mirror — because data is only available about the past.”

The authors then explain why experience and information by themselves are not enough: “There are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job.… This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.”

Then, in the first section titled “How to Find Happiness in Your Career”, the authors examine what it is that really makes us tick, and follow it up with an enlightening debate on "incentive" versus "motivation". By the time we are through with this section, we understand clearly why motivation trumps financial incentive every time.

Section 2 deals with "Finding Happiness in Your Relationships". Too few of us seem to have understood that there is much more to life than our career. That is why we focus a great deal on becoming the person we want to be at work — and far too little on the person we want to be at home. We indulge in this self-destructive behaviour because, the book tells us, investing our time and energy in “raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn't return clear evidence of success for many years”. Consequently, we over-invest in our careers, and under-invest in our families. What is the danger here? If we don’t nurture and develop those relationships, the book warns us, our family won’t be there to support us if we find ourselves traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in our life.

The third and final section, which happens to be the shortest, is devoted to the topic of living a life of integrity. Titled "Staying Out of Jail" (how appropriate), this section explores a theory that, the authors say, will help you answer your final question: How can I be sure I live a life of integrity?

And, finally, here's a quote from the book that should motivate you to grab hold of a copy right away:

It is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness.

If you read only one book this year, let it be this one. Especially if you are young and have embarked, or are about to embark, on a career and a relationship.

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-4

This was published in the August-September 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

"We accept the love we think we deserve."
— "Bill" to "Charlie", the main protagonist of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. "Charlie" had just told "Bill", his teacher, that his sister's boyfriend had hit her but she was still going around with him

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"Inside us there is something that has no name. That something is what we are."
— Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature José Saramago, quoted in Salman Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton

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"If you love life enough, it would seem you can force life to be good."
— American journalist Martha Gellhorn, in an article about life in post-war Italy, written in 1949. The article is part of an anthology of Gellhorn's writings, The View from the Ground 

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"An information-rich world is a time-poor world, and a time-poor world is an attention-poor world."
— P.M. Forni, in The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction

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"A great distance between you and your enemy is still the best defence."
— Czech refugee "Carl Zlinter" to "Jenny" in Nevil Shute's The Far Country, which is set in small-town Australia

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"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
— Norman Mailer, American novelist whose most popular books are The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song 

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"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." — Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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"If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time."
— Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres to Donald Rumsfeld, twice U.S. secretary of defence, quoted in the latter's book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir

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"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"
— C.L.R. James in Beyond a Boundary, hailed as the most finely crafted book on cricket ever written. It is said the book is, in a sense, a response to a Rudyard Kipling quote from the poem "English Flag": "What do they know of England who only England know?"

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Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-3

This was published in the June-July 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones that the school thinks it is teaching.”
— Salman Rushdie, in his memoir Joseph Anton

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“When they’re young, they step on your toes… when they grow up, they step on your heart.”
— “Charlie Brown” telling “Lucy” what his grandmother — “quite a philosopher” — says about children, in You’re a Winner, Charlie Brown!, by Charles Schulz

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“Women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
— American comedian George Carlin in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

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“Perhaps only a truly discontented child can become as seduced by books as I was. Perhaps restlessness is a necessary corollary of devoted literacy.”
— Journalist and author Anna Quindlen in her bestseller, How Reading Changed My Life

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“Art is what you can get away with.”
— Pop art pioneer Andy Warhol, quoted in The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas, and Liberty in the 21st Century, by A.C. Grayling

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“A smooth sea never produced a skilful navigator.”
— C.D. Narasimhaiah, founder-editor-publisher of the 60-year-old journal, The Literary Criterion, on his attitude to the obstacles he overcame to keep the publication going, quoted in a recent article in The Hindu (CDN died in 2005)

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“I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by any other writer.”
— British playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Somerset Maugham, in Ten Novels and Their Authors, expressing his admiration for Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time

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“If we think to regulate printing we … must regulate all recreations and pastimes.” (In other words, other liberties depend on a free press.)
— English poet John Milton, best known for the epic Paradise Lost, in a 17th-century polemic against press licensing, quoted in The Economist

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“He is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron — forever there and not there.”
— Bill Bryson, best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science, in Shakespeare: The World as Stage, lamenting that we know so little of Shakespeare’s life

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Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-2

This was published in the April-May 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”

— "The Whether Man" to "Milo", in The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

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“Faculties is different in different peoples, but cultivation of 'em goes a long way.”

— "Sam" to "Andy" on the importance of developing good habits such as "observation", in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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“It isn't the books you study in college but the friendships you make that counts.”
— "George F. Babbitt", in Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis

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“For a man to know what he has when he has it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.”

— "Fyodorov" in Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

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“We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him.”

— "Uchendu", the uncle of "Okonkwo", the protagonist of Nobel Prize-winning author Chinua Achebe's classic, Things Fall Apart

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“Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
— Ancient Greek dramatist Euripides, quoted in the epigraph in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff

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“Women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.”
— Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, her novel about a woman's search for her authentic self and for real love, first published in 1937

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“Forget for a moment how books should be read: Why should they be read? The first reason ... is that reading books can be intensely pleasurable. Reading is one of the great human delights.”
— Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

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“We fall in love with a person, or an idea, or a work of art — not in spite of the risk of losing ourselves, but because it is a way to lose ourselves.”

— Jonathan Biss in Beethoven's Shadow

• Also read: Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-1

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking-1

This was published in the first anniversary issue (February-March 2013) of Books & More magazine:

BOOKMARKS

Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU 

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”
— English philosopher A.C. Grayling, in a review in the Financial Times of A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

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“A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States

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“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.”
— Author Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

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“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”
— Austin Phelps, American Congregational minister and educator

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“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.”
— Gloria Jean Watkins (better known by her pen name Bell Hooks), American author, feminist, and social activist

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“You're the same today as you'll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read.”
— Author, speaker, and entrepreneur Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, who rose from the squalid poverty of the Great Depression to be hailed as one of the top twenty speakers of the 20th century

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“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
— Confucius

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“Having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.”
— Interior monologue of The Reader in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's  Night a Traveller

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“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
— Dr. Seuss in I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen name Dr. Seuss.

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“If you can read this, thank a teacher.”
— Anonymous teacher