I just finished "Managing Oneself" by Peter Drucker. It is a great short book I wish I had discovered earlier. Here are some lessons that stuck with me:
1) The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
2) Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths. Discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.
3) One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
4) Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities: they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. And then they can and should decide where they belong.
5) Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.
6) Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not “finished” after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored. A midlife crisis is mostly boredom.
7) At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs. But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job.
8) And yet they still face another 20 years of work. That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.
9) There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to start one, make a big career switch for a new challenge. The second is to develop a parallel career, a side business or spend hours in a not for profit.
10) Third route is the social entrepreneurs. These are usually people who have been very successful in their first careers. They love their work, but it no longer challenges them. Think Bill Gates.
11) The majority will “retire on the job” and count the years until their actual retirement. A minority, who see a long working-life as an opportunity both for themselves and for society, become leaders and models.
12) There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: you must begin long before you enter it.
13) Historically, there was no such thing as “success.” The over-whelming majority of people did not expect anything but to stay in their “proper station,” as an old English prayer has it. The only mobility was downward mobility.
14) In a knowledge society, however, we expect everyone to be a success. This is clearly an impossibility. For many people, there is at best an absence of failure.
15) It is vitally important to have an area in which you can contribute, make a difference, and be "somebody." This does not have to be work related. It means finding a second area that satisfies your soul. It can be family, faith, or a personal passion.
