Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker
Managing Oneself, by Peter Drucker, is an article-turned-book that provides a path to increasing your overall effectiveness.
You can apply the wisdom presented here to any area of your life, not just at work but also at school, at home, and in any other creative projects you pursue.
Productivity is a function of results and resources. You can improve your ability to achieve results when you develop a deeper understanding of who you are and how you work.
With a little self-reflection, you can bring various elements of your life into alignment. With greater alignment comes greater efficiency because everything you to do starts to unfold naturally, seamlessly.
3 Key Questions to Produce Better Results
"History's great achievers—a Napoléon, a da Vinci, a Mozart—have always managed themselves."
While it may come naturally for some, most people don’t know how to manage themselves, much less understand why it’s important.
To manage yourself, you must first know yourself. And you can start to know yourself a little more when you start asking the right questions…
In terms of time management, Drucker poses a few key questions that help paint the picture of your most productive self…
#1 - What are your strengths?
"Mathematicians are born, but everyone can learn trigonometry."
Everyone has unique strengths.
Working from your strengths—instead of your weaknesses—is a concept that's been brought up over and over again in many success circles.
Allocating your resources towards strengths will alway produce a greater return than if you were to invest those same resources towards weaknesses...
Drucker says that you "cannot build performance on weaknesses."
For this reason, you should understand what your strengths are, and put yourself in a position to capitalize on those strengths.
The only way to discover your strengths, he says, is through feedback analysis. A strong feedback system will let you know how you’re doing in relation to what you're trying to accomplish. It will provide clues and insights that allow you to improve your performance.
To fully realize your strengths, you must not only understand them but actively work on improving them.
Through your feedback system, you'll discover which Knowledge Gaps exist. Take the appropriate steps to fill those gaps by acquiring the necessary information and applying the corresponding skills.
Put yourself where your strengths can be used to produce results.
Then systematically work on improving your strengths.
If you're not sure where to start, check out Gallup's StrengthsFinder Assessment, a comprehensive questionnaire that will help you determine your natural talents.
Drucker later notes the importance of knowing not just your own strengths but also the strengths of those you work with.
You can pick up the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 to learn more about all the different kind of strengths that exist.
#2 - What are your values?
"Values are and should be the ultimate test."
Here's an exercise you can try, called the "mirror test."
Ask yourself, "What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?"
This question will direct your focus to a value system, the one that you've inherited or the one you've created.
Through this value system, you can determine what kind of decisions and actions would be effective and which ones would be ineffective.
Those that are in alignment with your values will be more effective. You'll feel better internally, and you'll move seamlessly towards your desired results.
Thinking and acting out of alignment with your value system will create friction.
The clash of two different value systems interacting with one another becomes dangerous terrain both mentally and emotionally.
For example, if you have relationships that are out of alignment, you won't feel like you're "on the same page" as the people you're with, whether that's socially or professionally.
If you have a friend who values watching TV as a nightly routine, and you value reading, the two of you might not make the best roommates.
When your values aren't aligned, you're not in an optimal environment to produce results.
Friction starts to build...
Observe.
It's your responsibility to change this. By changing your environment—the people you're with, the places you go—you're changing the inputs, and these changes will affect the outputs.
You have this power and you must exercise it if you're going to enhance your ability to produce results.
As Drucker says, "Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for your relationships."
Everything changes all the time... and that means you, too.
Who you were in high school is likely not the same person you were in college. And the you who graduated college is unlikely to be the same person who is leading his organization 10 years into his professional career.
As you change, so will your values.
And when your values change, your environment should follow suit. That means taking a hard look at what and who is in your life and having the courage to make the necessary adjustments.
So if your relationships have to change from what they were, so be it.
Accept it and act on it.
Or suffer the grueling pains of inefficiencies and unhappiness...
The Mirror Test helps you clarify your valuesIn the early 1900s, a prestigious German diplomat was residing in London. Destined for greatness, this man had a lot of respect in the political sphere and was poised to work his way up the ranks and lead cities and perhaps even the nation.
But that path came to an abrupt dead end after attending a royal dinner party. The king who invited him, Edward VII, was a notorious womanizer and wand he made it clear what kind of dinner he wanted. The German diplomat wanted nothing to do with such an event, nor any people facilitating such as events.
So he resigned, saying, "I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave."
He used the "mirror test" to clarify his values and make decisions accordingly.
His values didn't align with the values of those he was engaging with. So instead of trying to change those people, he changed his environment to create more alignment.
As you work throughout the day, notice any friction that may arise.
Friction indicates non-alignment.
When your work aligns with your values, you put yourself in a position to produce results effortlessly.
"Love what you do and you'll never have to work a day in your life."
If you're operating out of alignment, you put yourself at risk of greater unhappiness.
But you'll only know if you're out of alignment if you know what your values are.
#3 - How do you perform best?
The first questions clarifies what you do well. Once you know your strengths, you set yourself up to exercise those strengths as often as possible.
The second question clarifies whether or not you should be doing something at all. If you're using your strengths to do work that's not aligned with your values, you might be considered very productive but you won't be very happy.
Actually, Drucker recalled his career in investment banking. Although he was very good at his job, he noticed it did not align with his values, so he quit and started a new venture.
Applying the first question takes wisdom.
Applying the second takes courage.
And applying the last question takes both.
This last question acknowledges the differences we all have when it comes to producing results.
For example, some people learn better by doing. Their performance increases when they're "on the job" as opposed to "in the classroom." They need to consume the knowledge in a way that is experiential.
A geologist or an archeologist would probably perform better through experience than a philosopher or theologist.
Here are a few more questions if you want to go deeper...
- Do you communicate literally, or more generally (in his words, a Reader vs. a Listener)?
- Do you prefer a structured environment or something more unpredictable?
- Do you work well under pressure?
- Do you like working with teams or are you a solo artist?
- Do you like to play big?
- Do you prefer being on the frontlines or in the background?
- Do you like making decisions or do you like advising the decision-makers?
Remember, all of these questions are giving you a better understanding of yourself.
There's a lot assessments you can take that might help you take this understanding even deeper.
And how you deep you go is totally up to you. But generally speaking, there's a correlation between the depth of your self-knowledge and your ability to produce results in a state of balance and freedom.
If you're wondering what kind of work might be most aligned with your strengths and values, check out the Flower Exercise. This exercise helps you discover the 7 most important factors of your ideal workplace. Each factor is presented as one "petal" of the flower that makes up your most satisfying career.
While the flower exercise is catered more towards understanding your professional life, other tests and exercises help you understand the other parts of your life, like the DISC or Meyer's Briggs.
Once you've gotten clear on the above questions, one final question to ask yourself is:
"How should I contribute?"
This question points to focus, helping you channel your resources towards activities that you'll find highly rewarding.
When you manage yourself, you don't need to manage time...
If you know what time management is really about, you know that it’s not about managing your time at all.
Instead, it’s about managing yourself in relation to time.
You cannot touch time. You can't change the way the clock ticks... but you can change yourself, both your mindset and your skillset.
Time is an illusion—a construct of the mind used to organize the chaos of our external world. And if you feel stuck, stressed, or overwhelmed, it’s because you keep trying to manage the external world.
The solution is simple: stop trying to manage the external and instead start controlling the internal.
You are the internal: your thoughts, words, and actions.
This is the domain from which you can change your life through the lens of time management. It only takes a little bit of knowledge and action to create extraordinary results.
For a video explainer summarizing the book, Managing Oneself, click here.
For the audiobook version of Managing Oneself via Youtube, click here.
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