Success starts with knowing yourself: your strengths, how you work best, and where you belong.
It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than from first-rate performance to excellence. Put your effort into making a strength superb, not patching a weakness.
Before a key decision, write down what you expect to happen. Nine to twelve months later, compare it with what really happened - the pattern shows what you are truly good at.
Readers take in the world on paper; listeners take it in by ear, and almost nobody is both. Even presidents have failed by being forced to work the wrong way round.
Beethoven and Churchill learned by writing; others learn by doing, by taking notes, or by hearing themselves talk. Most people know their way but never act on it, so they never reach their best.
Many brilliant advisers fail when promoted to the top spot, because it demands carrying the decision, not just shaping it. The number two who thrives beside a leader may sink as the leader.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFHistory's great achievers - Napoleon, da Vinci, Mozart - always managed themselves. Drucker argues that ordinary knowledge workers must now do the same: no company will manage your career for you, and you will likely outlive any single organization you join. Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
It starts with strengths, and the only way to discover them is feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision, write down what you expect to happen; nine to twelve months later, compare expectation with reality. The method shows where to concentrate, what skills and knowledge to add, which bad habits to remedy - and which areas of low competence to leave alone, since raising incompetence to mediocrity costs far more energy than raising first-rate performance to excellence.
