"In the words of Andy Grove: "To understand a company's strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.".... Here is a way to frame the investments that we make in the strategy that becomes our lives: we have resources - which include personal time, energy, talent and wealth - and we are using them to try to grow several "businesses" in our personal lives... How should we devote our resources to these pursuits? Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation process will decide investments for you according to the "default" criteria that essentially are wired into your brain and your heart. As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process -and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. But it's a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what's important to you, it's still difficult to know which are the right choices. If you have an extra ounce of energy or a spare 30 minutes, there are a lot of people pushing you to spend them here rather than there. With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that's good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course... The danger for high-achieving people is that they'll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments... How you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend."