How will you measure your life?

Over the last couple of weeks a Harvard Business Review article entitled, How Our Careers Affect Our Children, has popped up in my social media feeds almost daily. It is a great and timely article that caused me to reflect on a dramatic career change I made 14 years ago.

My educational bio on LinkedIn lists a couple of degrees that you would expect to find on the resume of someone who has a career in financial services. However, the real conversation starter is the bachelor of education I completed at York University in 2005. Today, I am pretty sure I am one of a small group of people with a B.Ed in their downtown office. So, how does somebody go from a career in investment banking to becoming a teacher?

Well, the mid-career pivot followed months of reflection about what should come first: career or family? I could argue both sides of the case but ultimately decided in the favour of family following two separate but closely linked incidents. In the first case, I still remember how lost I felt when I had to leave my wife and young daughter at Sick Kids to fly out west for an investment banking pitch. Today, I couldn’t tell you who the corporate client was, but I do reminder how I felt departing the hospital. Secondly, I vividly recall driving along Adelaide Street after leaving work knowing that I was going to be late for daycare pick up again. In the wake of those two events, I made my decision, with the full support of my spouse and family and left Bay Street for a new venture in teaching. And I have absolutely no regrets about making that decision. Ultimately, I ended up returning to the financial services career but with a better idea of how I wanted to live my life.

Several years later I came across a compelling paper written by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen entitled, How Will You Measure Your Life. Originally delivered to HBS’s class of 2010, the paper became the basis for a book by the same name. In the paper, the author asks his student audience to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? I’ll let you read the article to find out where Clayton goes with the last question but thinking about the first two helps me think about how I am spending my time. And that brings us back to the inspiration for this piece and the article’s conclusion: “if we care about how our careers are affecting our children’s mental health, we can and should focus on the value we place on our careers and experiment with creative ways to be available, physically and psychologically, to our children, though not necessarily in more hours with them. Quality time is real.”