Clayton M. Christiansen, professor at Harvard Business School, writing in the Harvard Business Review:

“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. 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 relationships 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 say, ‘I raised a good son or a good daughter.’ You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a daily basis it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating.

“There is a 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.” Quoted in Readers Digest, February, 2011. An editor of Harvard Business Review says this article was one of the most resonant works they’ve ever published!