If you’d looked at my life on paper in high school and college, you would’ve seen a big success story: good grades, advanced classes, leadership roles, participation in selective programs. Inside, however, I was often lonely and depressed. I knew how to excel at school. I didn’t know how to build deep friendships.
But fast forward to today, I’m in my early 40s, and life feels rich and full. I run most mornings with friends, coach or referee for my kids’ sports teams, serve in my church community, and our family has dinner at least once a week with my in-laws who live across the street. My life feels crowded—in a good way—with relationships that are incredible sources of happiness and meaning.
Looking back now through the lens of Clayton Christensen’s work, I can see that what changed my life wasn’t just a shift in priorities in my head. It was a shift in the value network I chose to live inside.
How we measure our lives—and how we actually live them
Earlier this month, as part of the Christensen Institute’s membership webinar series, I listened to a conversation with Karen Dillon, who coauthored How Will You Measure Your Life? with Clay. She walked through the central questions Clay posed to his Harvard Business School students at the end of every semester: How can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career? How can I be sure my relationships with my spouse and family become an enduring source of happiness? How can I be sure I’ll live a life of integrity?
Clay’s core advice is deceptively simple:
- Be deliberate about the purpose of your life.
- Recognize that your real strategy is revealed by where you actually allocate your resources—your time, energy, and attention—not by what you say your priorities are.
He warned his students that people with a high need for achievement—like HBS grads—are irresistibly drawn to the arenas where feedback and rewards are fast and tangible. Ship a product, close a deal, publish a paper, get promoted. Meanwhile, the slow, often invisible work of building a marriage, raising children, and nurturing friendships can be quietly starved of attention for years at a time.
Clay’s message is that if we don’t consciously keep the purpose of our lives “front and center” as we decide how to invest our time and talents, we can wake up decades later with a life strategy we never deliberately chose.
That framing has always resonated with me. But listening to Karen, I realized there is another Christensen idea that belongs alongside it: value networks.
Value networks: not just for companies
In my research on innovation, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why smart leaders, with all the right intentions, repeatedly fail to steer their organizations into the future. The short answer is: value networks.
A value network is the web of relationships that defines what an organization must prioritize to survive and thrive—investors and donors, customers and clients, regulators, unions, vendors, and so on. Those relationships don’t just influence what leaders say they care about. They shape which strategies are actually viable.
That’s why minicomputer companies like Digital Equipment Corporation could see the emerging personal computer market and even build early prototypes, but still failed to prioritize it. Their best customers wanted ever-more-powerful machines, not small, cheap, “toy” computers. Their investors saw clear growth in the existing business and uncertainty in the new one. Even when executives intellectually understood the potential of the personal computer, the company’s business model was tuned to respond to its value network and therefore steered resources toward the high-performance machines its customers demanded.
In my work on K–12 schooling, I’ve argued that the same dynamic explains why school systems struggle to adopt radically different models of learning. State and federal policies, funding formulas, college admissions criteria, union contracts, and community expectations all press them toward doing conventional school a bit better, not toward reinventing it. If you want a new model of schooling, you need a new value network.
Listening to Karen, it struck me: the same thing is true in our personal lives.
Clay is absolutely right that we need a clear purpose and disciplined resource allocation. But there is a deeper, structural question underneath those daily choices:
What value network are you living in, and is it compatible with the life you say you want?
My adolescent value network: School as the whole world
When I think about the loneliest season of my life—late childhood through college—the through-line is evident in hindsight.
Starting around fifth grade, I discovered that I could earn a lot of status and affirmation from adults by being a certain kind of student: obedient, diligent, organized, and high-achieving. Teachers praised me. I made the honor roll. I was “the good kid.”
As the developmental psychologist, David Yeager, points out in his research on adolescence, those years are when young people are trying to answer the question, “What makes me matter? How do I earn status and respect?” For me, the answer became: school. Do the work, get the grade, follow the rules, impress adults.
So I built my personal value network around school. My most important relationships, in practice, were with teachers, grades, and future admissions committees—those were the “actors” whose approval I cared about most. Friends were nice to have, but optional and fragile, especially as my family moved a few times.
The result was predictable. I did very well academically. I also spent many evenings alone at a desk, obsessing over homework, college applications, and, later, GPA. When I got a B in high school, I was devastated for weeks. In college, when I got a C in econometrics, it felt like an identity crisis.
On paper, my strategy was to be a well-rounded, happy young adult with good grades and rewarding relationships. In reality, my value network made one thing non-negotiable—academic success—and treated relationships as expendable.
I wasn’t just misallocating my time. I was embedded in a value network that kept pushing my resource allocation in the wrong direction.
Choosing a different value network
The turning point in my life wasn’t a New Year’s resolution or a clever productivity system. It was a person.
During a summer internship, when the pressures of school were dialed down, I met Mary Zuback, the woman who would become my wife. We met through church activities for young single adults, and what struck me about her was how different her internal yardstick was from mine.
She was friendly, warm, and deeply oriented toward people. She was an above-average student, but she didn’t organize her life around maximizing academic achievement. What mattered most to her was family, connection, and time with people she loved.
Marrying her didn’t just add another relationship to my existing world. It rewired my value network.
Suddenly, I had made a covenant that carried real claims on my time and energy. There was someone else whose flourishing I was explicitly responsible for. Her priorities—family, connection, community—became non-negotiable constraints in my life, not just nice-to-have aspirations.
And that has shown up, again and again, in the strategic choices we’ve made together.
- As a Teach For America teacher, instead of living in the urban core with other corps members—where my social life and professional identity would revolve around teaching heroics—we chose to live in a suburb near my aunt and uncle. That gave us crucial support with our two young kids. It also meant that when school ended for the day, I went home. My weekends were not a blank canvas for lesson planning; they were family time.
- In my MBA program, the implicit value network said: Classes are manageable; the real game is networking—late nights at bars, company receptions, and social events with classmates. With a young family at home, I went to class, did the work, and then went home. I did fine academically, but I didn’t build the dense web of professional relationships that many classmates did.
- In my early years at the Christensen Institute, the obvious career move when our main office moved to Boston would have been to move with it, to be physically close to colleagues and senior leaders. Instead, we stayed in the Bay Area to be near my parents and the community I’d grown up in. Later, when my parents moved away, we moved to the Southern California town where my wife grew up, to be close to her parents.
At every one of those forks in the road, I could tell myself a story about balancing work and family. But structurally, what we were doing was choosing a value network: extended family over headquarters; church community and neighborhood over the professional scene; a town of local professionals over a major metro full of hyper-ambitious strivers.
None of these choices made my career impossible—but they did cap certain kinds of ambition. I haven’t been the always-on, first-in-last-out, hyper-successful professional that my younger self aspired to be. There are projects I didn’t chase, professional relationships I didn’t cultivate, and late-night hours I didn’t put in.
In exchange, I have had something else: a life that is resistant to loneliness.
A life that resists loneliness
We’ve now lived in our current town for six years. It’s an hour outside Los Angeles, far enough that most people here don’t work for big-name companies or chase the prestige ladders of major industries. People work hard—as small business owners, military personnel, health care professionals, lawyers, real estate agents—but work is not the only thing shaping their identity.
Our kids are embedded in local sports and activities. I’ve coached track and soccer, refereed games, and gotten to know other parents on the sidelines. I’m deeply involved in our local congregation, where volunteer roles and shared service create real interdependence. I work from home, which means I’m there when the kids get home from school and present for the small, ordinary moments that accumulate into relationships.
And then there’s my running club, the friends I mountain bike with, the people I surf or play pickleball with.
Put simply: my calendar is full of commitments to other human beings.
When I read about the loneliness epidemic, I recognize the social and technological forces driving it. But my day-to-day experience is the opposite. The difference is not that I have superhuman willpower to “prioritize relationships.” The difference is that my value network keeps pulling my time and attention toward people.
That network began, decisively, with a marriage to someone whose priorities challenged and complemented my own. It has been reinforced by where we chose to live, how we structured our work, and the institutions—family, church, neighborhood, kids’ activities—we chose to bind ourselves to.
For Clay, the ultimate yardstick in life was the individual people whose lives he’d helped. In my case, I don’t think I would be on track for that kind of yardstick if I had stayed in the value network I was cultivating as an adolescent who measured worth primarily through grades, degrees, career milestones, and accomplishments.
It’s not just willpower. It’s commitments and value networks.
Clay’s framework for personal strategy focuses on purpose and resource allocation: decide what matters, then invest accordingly. That’s necessary, but I don’t think it’s sufficient.
What my own life has taught me—and what Karen’s reflections helped crystallize—is this:
If you want your resource allocation to match your purpose, you have to choose value networks and commitments that make the right choices the path of least resistance.
Willpower is limited. Environments are powerful. The research on habits and behavior change is full of examples of people who don’t succeed just by caring more about something; they succeed by changing the context so that the new behavior is expected, supported, and normal.
The same logic applies to how we measure our lives.
If you say you value relationships, but your entire value network consists of colleagues and clients who reward you mainly for productivity and performance, you are going to be rowing upstream most days. If you say you value health, but your social life is organized around late nights and sedentary habits, you will find it hard to prioritize health, no matter how many times you resolve to do better.
So alongside Clay’s questions—What is the purpose of my life? How am I allocating my resources?—I would add a third:
What value network am I embedded in, and what is it training me to care about?
People don’t need to make the same life choices I did to benefit from this framework. Marriage, family, church, and neighborhood involvement were the commitments that reshaped my value network—but those are not the only pathways to meaning or to strong relationships. The underlying principle is broader:
If you want your life to pull you toward the things you value, embed yourself in communities that make those things normal, expected, and supported.
Here are some ways that can take shape, depending on your own convictions and circumstances:
- If you value relationships, look for commitments that create regular, structured connections—joining a faith community, a volunteer organization, a mutual-aid group, or even a weekly gathering built around a shared interest or purpose. The key is not the form but the rhythm: people who need you to show up and notice when you’re absent.
- If you value health, find communities where healthy habits are part of the social fabric—running clubs, hiking groups, martial arts studios, cycling teams, dance communities, or any setting where participation is collective rather than solitary.
- If you value a broader community, choose commitments that place you in interdependent roles—coaching youth programs, mentoring, participating in arts groups, serving on local committees, joining hobby clubs, or contributing to civic organizations.
The specifics vary. The common thread is this:
Value networks shape behavior. If you want different behaviors—or a different life—you often need to start by choosing a different value network.
Your commitments don’t have to look like mine. They just have to be real. They have to put claims on your time. And they have to put you in relationship with other people in ways that matter.
None of these choices will magically produce a balanced life. There are tradeoffs. The commitments that anchor you in relationships will also constrain certain kinds of career paths. They will force you to invest in people even when the “marginal returns” in the short run look higher elsewhere.
But that is exactly the kind of constraint you want if, like Clay, you hope that your life will ultimately be measured by the people you’ve helped, not just the projects you’ve completed.
Returning to Clay’s question
As we reach the end of the year—a natural season for reflection—Clay’s question, “How will you measure your life?” feels as urgent as ever. For me, listening to Karen Dillon in our recent membership webinar was a reminder that Clay’s theories are not just tools for analyzing companies and systems. They are tools for examining the architecture of our own lives.
Purpose matters. Resource allocation matters. But so do value networks.
If there is a single lesson my own journey has driven home, it is this:
Don’t just choose your goals. Choose your value network.
And then, live inside that network long enough for its quiet, everyday demands to do their work on you—shaping, over time, the story you’ll someday tell about how your life was measured.
