Here are some management tools that can be used to help you lead a purposeful life.
1. Use Your Resources Wisely. Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent shape your life’s strategy. We have a limited amount of time, energy and talent. How much do we devote to each of these pursuits
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. If you don’t invest your resources wisely, the outcome can be bad. As I think about people who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people with a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments.
Our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward.
In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationships with your spouse and children typically doesn’ t offer the same immediate sense of achievement. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to under invest in their families and overinvest in their careers, even though intimate and loving family relationships are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see that people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
2. Create a Family Culture. If employees embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision, which means that they’ve created a culture. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.
At the teen years, parents start wishing they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and the confidence that they can solve hard problems, you have to design them into family’ s culture and you have think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 4 is demonstrated______.
A.to present a comparison B.to offer a definition C.to provide further explanation D.to illustrate career development