Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics)

by Peter F. Drucker

a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

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.

First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.

Mathematicians are born, but everyone can learn trigonometry.

Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.

Schools everywhere are organized on the assumption that there is only one right way to learn and that it is the same way for everybody. But to be forced to learn the way a school teaches is sheer hell for students who learn differently.

Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform.

Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?

most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.