Larissa MacFarquhar Quote

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.

Larissa MacFarquhar

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.

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About Larissa MacFarquhar

Larissa MacFarquhar (born 1968) is an American writer known for her profiles in The New Yorker.
She is the daughter of the sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar. She was born in London, and moved to the United States at the age of 16.
MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and has written profiles on Barack Obama, Derek Parfit, Hilary Mantel, Robert Gottlieb, Richard Posner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz, among others. Her 2015 book Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help explores the motivations of people who take altruism to extremes. She is married to the writer Philip Gourevitch.