Focus on those strengths your own core competencies and find new ways to cultivate and cherish them. Odds are, you can apply them to a variety of jobs, volunteer positions, and more.
3. Creating a parallel or second career
Drucker said, “The purpose of the work on making the future is not to decide what should be done tomorrow, but what should be done today to have a tomorrow.” One unique idea he advocated was creating a “parallel career” in areas such as teaching, writing, or working in nonprofit organizations. He also encouraged developing a second career, often by doing similar work in a significantly different setting a lawyer, for instance, might move from a traditional law firm to a legal nonprofit dedicated to a personally meaningful cause. While still in your main job, start thinking about your own possibilities for a parallel or second career. Consider how they match your values, experience, and education, and what shifts you might need to make in your life to support such changes.
4. Exercising your generosity
An essential part of living in more than one world, Drucker believed, is displaying a sense of generosity. Here, he said, “…everybody is a leader, everybody is responsible, everybody acts.” Sharing your time and talents in areas such as volunteerism, social entrepreneurship, and mentoring not only provide opportunities to contribute, but also offer personal benefits, from broadening and deepening your life experience to expanding your circle of friends and colleagues. Think about what happens outside your workplace in other industries, professions, and walks of life and consider ways you can exercise your own generosity.
5. Teaching and learning
In Drucker’s vision of a strong, functioning society, education plays a key role. He believed that knowledge workers must start learning during their formal schooling and then never stop throughout their lives. However, it’s up to them, he said, to incorporate continuous learning as a natural part of their daily life deciding what and how they’d like to learn and determining how they’ll build in the time. Consider your own priorities for learning, as well as how you learn best taking classes, reading articles and books, asking or observing others, or some blend therein. You might also want to teach. As Drucker acknowledged, “No one learns as much as the person who must teach his subject.”
Start where you are
Drucker’s secrets to success can help your own life and career be more satisfying, meaningful and multidimensional. Seven tips for getting started:
1. Focus on achievement not money
Drucker drew an important distinction between achievement and money. He suggested focusing on achievement and paying attention to how your successes, on and off the job, benefit both you and others. That doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t make money, Drucker explained, but that the pursuit of money ought to play a subordinate role.