How Will You Measure your Life?

So, this guy was quoted multiple times in General Conference.  Then this month, an abridgment of his article showed up in Reader's Digest, so I managed to find it.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, 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 my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

The Class of 2010 (Located at the end of this article)

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.

The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—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. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families 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 the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home 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 or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.

This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”

I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.

In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Choose the Right Yardstick

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Elder Christofferson re Daily Bread

I'll be adding the text to this when it becomes available.  Clorinda put this on today, and I was really enjoying it.  I'll need to read it before being able to really comment on it.

David B. Haight on Preparation in the Priesthood

OK, it's time I started posting again.  This is a good one for use w/ my deacons...

A Time for Preparation

Elder David B. Haight
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

David B. Haight, “A Time for Preparation,” Ensign, Nov 1991, 36

I thank the Lord for this wonderful opportunity to be with you here tonight, you who hold the priesthood. I pray that my words will be appropriate, clearly heard, and understood.

Some of you here tonight have just turned twelve years of age and are brand new deacons. Many of you are thirteen, or fourteen, or sixteen, or older. But I want to speak especially to you of the Aaronic Priesthood, and others of you may listen if you desire.


Some of you have just had a birthday. I just had a birthday—my eighty-fifth. You enjoyed your birthday party, and I had a wonderful time at mine. You had your young friends around you, and I had my old friends around me. There is, however, a vital difference between us—I have had seventy-plus years of experience and learning beyond yours. I have been abundantly blessed with a most challenging, exciting, and wonderfully productive life—a lifetime of witnessing a world in action. There have been many disappointments and heartaches, but always opportunities, new horizons, and blessings beyond measure. I’ve also learned some important lessons and truths. One, the Scout motto, Be Prepared, is for real.


I grew up in a small country town in Idaho. Football came to our school later than most. It was 1923. We had neither equipment nor a coach. But the great day arrived when our high school principal was able to buy twelve inexpensive football outfits—but not football shoes with cleats. We used our basketball shoes. Our chemistry teacher was recruited to be our coach because he had once witnessed a real game.


He taught us a few simple plays and how to tackle, and then we were ready to play—or so we thought. We set off for our first game with Twin Falls, the previous year’s Idaho state champions.


We dressed and went out on the field to warm up. Their school band started to play (they had more students in the band than we had in our entire high school)—and then through the gates came their team. They kept coming and coming—all thirty-nine of them—fully equipped, and shoes with cleats. The twelve of us—a full team of eleven plus one all-round substitute, watched in amazement.


The game was most interesting! To say it was a learning experience is rather mild. After just two plays, we had no desire to have the ball—so we kicked it, and they scored. Whenever they got the ball, they would run a baffling play and score. Our goal was to get rid of the ball—it was less punishing.


In the final minutes of the game they became a little reckless and a wild pass fell into the arms of Clifford Lee, who was playing halfback with me. He was startled, not knowing for sure what to do—that is, until he saw them thundering after him. Then he knew what to do and boy, was he fast! But he wasn’t running for points, he was running for his life! Clifford made a touchdown; six points went up on the scoreboard. The final score—106 to 6! We really didn’t deserve the six points, but with our bloody shirts and socks, and cuts and bruises—we took them anyway.


A learning experience? Of course! An individual or a team must be prepared. Success or achievement depends upon preparation.


The Aaronic Priesthood years are critical years of preparation. The Lord knew young men would need these valuable teen years to prepare for life—precious years with meaningful, never-to-be-forgotten spiritual experiences. You will face some crucial decisions, but hopefully you will take advantage of the seasoned experience and counsel of your loving parents and concerned priesthood leaders.


In 2 Timothy in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul is jailed in a dark, dreary dungeon awaiting execution for his belief in Jesus Christ and teaching His gospel. Pouring out his troubled soul and firm conviction, he pleads in a letter written to his dear young friend, Timothy, to be faithful to the truths that have been taught to him and to remember “the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.” (2 Tim. 1:6.) Paul had personally blessed and ordained Timothy and now urged him to be strong and not ashamed of his testimony of our Lord, come what may.


The Apostle Paul was fearless and never wavered in his testimony of Jesus. His faith and determination lifted him from being a tentmaker to become a teacher, a missionary, leader, and organizer of Christian branches. He most certainly wasn’t a “sissy” nor weak. People of great faith know what is right and do it. They have uncompromised determination and commitment and are capable of enduring pressure or hardship. Paul knew what was right, and you know what is right. When you take courage like Paul and do what you know is right, nothing will stop your progress but yourself.


“Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. It is … words that speak boldly of your intentions; and … actions which speak louder than … words. It is … coming through time after time after time, year after year after year. It is what character is made of.”


Oh, how this world needs committed, determined, and courageous young people—young men with a righteous conviction—who will help bind up its wounds and teach faith, hope, and truth! Where will these young people come from? They will come from the ranks of the young men and women of this Church—that’s where.


The Lord asked, “Unto what were ye ordained?” and then answered, “To preach my gospel by the Spirit, even … to teach the truth.” (D&C 50:13–14.)


President Spencer W. Kimball stated that “You are the sons of God, [that] you are the elect of God, and you have within your [grasp] the possibility to become a god and pass by the angels … to your exaltation”—possibilities which seem beyond ordinary imagination—yet the promises are divine. (The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, ed. Edward L. Kimball, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1982, p. 496.)


As the foundation of the Salt Lake Temple was being laid, with footings sixteen feet wide, President Brigham Young discovered the workmen were using a soft stone. The work was halted, the soft stone taken out and replaced with giant blocks of granite. He declared: “We are building this temple to stand through the millennium” (LeGrand Richards, Ensign, Dec. 1971, p. 81.)


“Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing,” the Lord admonishes, “for ye are laying the foundation of a great work.” (D&C 64:33.)


You Aaronic Priesthood holders are setting your personal foundation stones in place—stones of granite—character stones that hopefully will last forever. Your foundation stones should include principles taught by the Savior: of faith, prayer, obedience, honesty, truth, and accountability for your actions. And, of course, a keystone of your foundation will be the priesthood—the power and authority of God delegated to you to act in matters pertaining to salvation—with its accompanying obligations and blessings.


You are a member of a quorum of the priesthood with officers of your peers—with duties, powers, and responsibilities. You are learning how Church members reach out to rescue and assist those who drift away or have a sorrow or a hurt. You are beginning to develop a sensitivity for Christlike service to others that brings joy to one’s soul.


God our Heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ determined—just imagine!—that Joseph Smith was old enough at fourteen to begin his instruction that would bring about the mighty work of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Joseph saw the living God! He saw the living Christ! He was trusted with a heavenly task, and he completed it. You, too, are old enough to be trusted with ever-increasing tasks.


You young Aaronic Priesthood men are old enough to know right from wrong, to know about Satan and his evil influence. Satan is a Hebrew name for the devil. It means adversary—one who wages open war with the truth and those who obey truthful principles. Satan chose the evil course from the beginning. His greatest aim, as taught by Moses and Enoch, is to get men to worship him. (See Moses 1:12; Moses 6:49.) He has had great success. As the professed god of this world, Satan has the adoration and worship of those who live after the manner of the world. All forms of wickedness and evil and rebellion against God’s holy purposes are of the devil. However, we are tested and challenged and must work out our salvation in the presence of evil. Lehi taught: “It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.” (2 Ne. 2:11.) We have our agency to choose right from wrong, good from evil. But just because evil exists does not mean that we must partake of it. You cannot do wrong and feel right.


Members of our Church know that tobacco and beer and alcohol, in all of their forms, have been condemned by the medical and scientific world as well as by God for the use of man. Civil laws of control are generally weak and difficult to enforce. With our inspired understanding, our most effective control over these poisonous products comes from ourselves.


Even though San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young was the only Mormon in his high school in Connecticut, he reported that there was no drinking with his group of friends, despite intense pressure from classmates. (San Francisco Chronicle, 23 Sept. 1991, p. D3.)


You are old enough to know the serious consequences and chain of events that leads from the drinking of beer to hard liquor—leading to the loss of mental control and often to automobile accidents, loss of respect, and sexual immorality.


Some young women have stated to the news media that they are pressured by young men into sexual involvement, even threatened with unpopularity if they don’t cooperate. They surely couldn’t be referring to you, could they?


You young men are the protectors of your sisters and of the girls with whom you associate. Your duty to them and to yourself is to be morally clean and sexually pure before the Lord. Movies and television scenes often imply moral cleanliness is old fashioned and not in tune with this modern world, but commandments cut into the stone tablets by the finger of God have not changed. The Lord declared, “Thou shalt not … commit adultery,” and later added, “nor do anything like unto it.” (D&C 59:6.) The commandments are clear and understandable and uncompromising.


Lucifer is smart and cunning and understands weaknesses, so he can destroy. Emotions and passions are God-given, but controllable.


My father died when I was only nine. As I was growing up I would often think, “What would my father think of me?” or “How could I ever disappoint my mother?” She taught me and believed in me. I was no a longer a little child but an emerging man, so I needed to act accordingly.


And so it is with you. Good people believe in you. We believe in you, your parents and brothers and sisters believe in you, and God expects the best from you. You must believe in yourself.


Don’t give in when the going is rough, for you are laying the foundation of a great work, and that great work is your life, the fulfillment of your dreams. Never underestimate what you can become or how your talents may eventually be used.


I don’t ever remember a time in my young life when I had to go through the trial of breaking in a brand new pair of shoes. They were already broken in by the time I got them as hand-me-downs.


We hear that some young men not only request a pair of new shoes for school, but another for sports, and another for church. But not just any athletic shoe will do. They must have special designer label or be a special advertised brand. Your jeans have to be “501s” or “Guess” or “Calvin Klein.” Have you fallen into a trap of peer pressure that requires a certain look for you to be included in the “in” crowd, whether or not your parents can afford such demands?


Do others set your standards—what you will wear and what you will do—and not do? Believing young men and women with standards and values make these decisions for themselves and let others follow. Why aren’t we, as Latter-day Saints—with our high ideals—the examples, the peer leaders setting the standards and criteria that others follow?


The brand of clothes and the shoes you wear, and the gadgetry, probably not affordable by your parents, has absolutely no bearing on what you will eventually become. Our actions, our personal behavior, and our attitude determine our character and future.


The world needs someone to look up to—like you. A national leader remarked, “There comes a time when we must take a stand—when we draw a line in the dust and say, ‘Beyond this line, we do not go.’ ”


Your preparation should include your personal conversion to the gospel truths of this work—knowing who the Savior is and who you are, and why He loved you enough to make the atoning sacrifice for you.


Sounds difficult? I promise you that you can know, but only if you desire, with humble prayer and careful study of the scriptures. The Lord taught, “Search the scriptures … which testify of me” and “ponder upon the things which I have said.” (John 5:39; 3 Ne. 17:3.)


Your continuing preparation is to be worthy to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood, keeping yourself clean and honorable and praying for strength and courage to withstand the evil temptations that surely come to every young man. If a mistake is made, discuss it with your bishop immediately. Do not let mistakes get an upper hold on you. Change bad behavior to good—and do it now. This is called repentance.


I hope you have already made a commitment to yourself and to your Heavenly Father that you will serve a full-time mission. The Lord needs your service, and you need the unmeasured blessings.


The Prophet Joseph Smith, in answer to a query about this remarkable organization, said, “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.” I promise you, young priesthood holders, that if you will follow that counsel to govern yourselves by correct principles—principles you learn at home, through the scriptures, modern-day prophets, and the Holy Ghost—your decisions will be made with confidence and ease. And though fierce winds may be whipping the trees, your roots will be deeply entrenched in the ground.


I am a living witness of our Eternal Heavenly Father’s love and mercy. He lives as does His Son, our Savior. This is His holy work, I testify in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.