1-Sentence-Summary: Managing Oneself is a guide to developing a skillful persona and learning more about your strengths, weaknesses, inclinations, and how you collaborate with others, all while making yourself more knowledgeable about how to thrive in your career.
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We live in an ever-changing world, where market demands fluctuate, personal needs and values change at a much faster pace than before, and so does the working environment. To navigate these winds of change and the dynamicity of our world, you’ll have to improve yourself and develop skills that can lift you.
Way too often, individuals lag behind their peers due to a lack of direction. Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker delves into the self-improving strategy we all need, starting with knowing yourself, to focusing on your strengths and communication style. Being successful despite our weaknesses is a powerful skill itself. So, how can we achieve it?
Let’s take a look at three of the best ways to improve yourself and achieve success starting from your native values:
- Know your strengths and weaknesses by conducting a feedback analysis.
- Understand your communication style and how you work with others.
- Work on your second career to keep yourself engaged and challenged in your working life.
Lesson 1: Start your self-development journey by learning about your strengths and weaknesses
Much like everything that holds a true, intrinsic value in life, your future success needs a foundation to lie upon. Starting from a feedback analysis, you’ll have to discover what are your strengths and weaknesses and how to work with them in any endeavor you engage with.
You can start by carrying out a feedback analysis of your key actions. Whenever you make an important decision, make a note about what your expected outcome is. One year later compare the expectation with the reality. Ask yourself what your strength and weaknesses were in the process and how they affected the outcome.
This process is highly important in your feedback analysis. In time, it’s crucial to know what your areas of strength are, and implicitly, what you should be bringing forth, and what you should be working on. Consequently, knowing your gifted areas allows you to look for skills to sustain them and enhance them.
Nevertheless, a feedback analysis also implies knowing your core values and also checking up on yourself to see if your work reflects them. Don’t work for a mission or a place that goes against your belief system, because it’ll affect your performance and moral compass.
Lesson 2: How you communicate with other people tells a lot about where you belong and how you can do the job
Understanding what your collaboration style is, if you’re a reader or a listener, if you prefer to rule or listen to a leader, communicate with your team, or work solo, are all crucially defining factors of your professional persona.
Communication is a key element of anyone’s life and the network we form plays a huge role in our success story. Therefore, mastering and tailoring it to our persona is essential. The enhance your relationships, you must first acknowledge that everyone else is an individual just like you.
They have dreams, hopes, aspirations, fears, and pain points. To get things done together, you must know the strength and weaknesses of each other. Your part is to learn about your interlocutor and take responsibility for the communication. You have to let them know what you’re good at and what you want.
Stating what your expectations are, what are your values, boundaries, and work style is only going to enhance communication. However, to know what those are, you’ll have to carry on a feedback analysis, which sets the pace for all your endeavors.
Lesson 3: A second career might be the key to a fulfilled, challenging, thrilling life
Talking about a second career while you might not have the first one figured out yet doesn’t sound like something you’d want to jump straight into, but hear me out! Many people focus their lives on their core professional endeavor, without leaving much room for lateral growth.
Then, the mid-life crisis hits, and they find themselves burnt out and loathing their job. Others feel like they’ve reached the top of their career ladder and that their work no longer provides meaning to their lives. For this reason, starting a second career might be the right choice.
Essentially, there are three ways to develop a second career:
- The first is obvious: starting that career.
- The second one is to develop your side career on top of the existing one and work your way around it when the time allows for it.
- The third way is to start a non-profit organization or find a way to gove back to your community.
However, if you want to fit this concept into your life will make you gain a higher sense of accomplishment and joy in your professional life. Having more areas of interest and fulfilling multiple passions will help you reach a state of self-actualization and enjoyment.
Managing Oneself Review
Managing Oneself presents a way out of your head and into the objective reality, where you have strengths and weaknesses, relationships to maintain, working environments to face, and altogether a persona to work on. This book can help you tap into your highest potential and work with what you’ve got by helping you discover your inner talents and build skills that match them. Reading this book will help you thrive in your personal and professional life.
Who would I recommend the Managing Oneself summary to?
The 30-year-old person who is working on their self-development journey, the 36-year-old person who feels more self-aware in their life and wants to start building it according to their needs and wants, or the 24-year-old who is struggling to find what they’re good at.
Last Updated on October 6, 2022
