“It is easier to hold to
your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent
of the time.”
The above is a quote from Clayton Christensen in his book “How Will
You Measure Your Life?” Clayton is
the Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School of Harvard University. The book was published in 2012, while he was
60. As a professor at the Harvard
Business School, he taught and discussed with many students every year about
their career paths after they left the University. After witnessing too many sad stories, he
summarized his teachings into formulating answers and strategies to 3
fundamental questions:
- How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career?
- How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness?
- How can I be sure that I live a life of integrity- and stay out of jail?
He knew for sure that “none of
those people (with sad stories)
graduated with a deliberate strategy to get divorced or lose touch with their
children- much less to end up in jail. Yet this is the exact strategy that too many
ended up implementing.” He realized
that it was strategies and theories that mattered. “You
might be tempted to try to make decisions in your life based on what you know
has happened in the past or what has happened to other people…. But this doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge
of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should
ignore as you embark into the future. Instead,
robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of
success.” What he did was to try to
highlight theories that applied successful in business organizations, and to
apply them in answering the above 3 questions.
It is sure anti-climax to tell young Harvard graduates that their
aim in life should be ensuring happiness by having a career that makes you
happy (not about money or position), maintaining relationships, and keeping
yourselves out of jail! Since I am
probably fixed in the first 2 aspects, I am more interested in how to keep
myself out of jail. Here comes Clayton’s
famous quote: “It is easier to hold to
your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent
of the time.” He tried to explain
why people deviated so much from their aspiration by the theory of “marginal
costs”. “Many of us have convinced ourselves that
we are able to break our own personal rules ‘just this once.’ In our minds, we can justify these small
choices. None of those things, when they
first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always
low. But each of those decisions can
roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you
never wanted to be.”
He used 2 examples to illustrate that the
actual cost implication would be much higher than the individual marginal
cost. The first was the story about Nick
Leeson, the twenty-six-year-old trader who famously brought down British
merchant bank Barings in 1995 after racking up $1.3 billion in trading losses
before being detected. That was not a
planned action. Everything started with
a small error that Nick chose to cover up instead of admitting it. The second was Clayton’s own story. He joined the university basketball team when
he was studying in England. Once, he
refused to take part in the champion game he had longed for, and that his coach
insisted his attending, and his team-mates and friends begged him to. The reason was that the game fell on a
Sunday, and Clayton had made a personal commitment to God that he would never
play ball on Sunday because it was their Sabbath. It turned out that his team won despite his
absence. And he drew the conclusion that
he had made the right choice and that sticking 100 percent to his principle
saved him from crossing of the line repeatedly in the future.
At this point, I would like to tell my own story. When I was a
houseman in a medical ward, my senior told me repeatedly that I should order a
chest X-ray for an in-patient with COAD (chronic obstructive airway disease) if
his condition deteriorated. That was to
make sure that there were no new complications such as pneumothorax. Soon, I found that I had to order portable
X-ray nearly everyday for half of the COAD patients. By no means was I able to follow the
instruction that my senior reiterated. So
I had to clinically distinguish who deteriorated more among those who
deteriorated. I came to the same
conclusion that following guidelines and instructions 100 percent was much
simpler. However, there were various
constrains in real life. Furthermore,
medicine is not exact science. Doctors
have to make decisions on which principle to apply, and more often, to justify
deviation from the principle because of various real-life limitations such as resources,
patient’s
condition, patient’s preference. Right
from the start, we have chosen the hard way.
It is still important to remember Clayton’s teaching. I am not telling you to be a rigid,
button-pressing, robotic doctor; though it might not be a bad choice for young
doctors in the recent doctor-blaming, illogical, probability-ignorant
environment. What Clayton meant was that
once you deviate from the principle, you lost your norm. Your principle became “principle + 1”. You got used to it, and next time, you deviated
from your “principle + 1” and set the “principle + 2” as norm. It would be tempting to do it again, and
again. The result was that you moved away from the principle, which was set out
with a sound reason, miles away. My
strategy to tackle this “deviation from strategy” dilemma is to be mindful. Always remember and judge with respect to the
original principle. Each event is an
individual event and does not affect the principle at large.
Since we have chosen the hard way to uphold 98 % of the time, be
aware of the difficulties and the implications. Work out your own strategy to stay away from
trouble, and jail.
(Source: HKMA News February 2018)
