Managing Yourself

To do things well, you’ll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are, but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution.

First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.Second, work on improving your strengths. Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve skills or acquire new ones. It will also show gaps in your knowledge – and those can usually be filled. Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.

It is equally essential to remedy your bad habits.One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.

Questions to ask yourself:
Am I a reader or a listener?
How do I learn?
Do I work well with people, or am I a loner?
Do I produce results as a Decision Maker or as an advisor?
Do I perform well under stress or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
Do I work best in a big organization or a small organization?
What are my values?
Where do I belong?
What should I contribute?

Excerpts from Peter Drucker's Managing Yourself