How to Find Out What You're Actually Good At, According to Peter Drucker

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at — and even then, more people are wrong than right.

That sentence is not mine. It is Drucker's. He wrote it in a short essay in 1999 that has quietly become one of the most-read business pieces ever published. The essay is called Managing Oneself. The claim above is the part that sticks with me.

I have been thinking about it for a few days now. It sounds like the kind of thing you nod at and move past. Sure, sure — people overrate themselves. We have all met someone who thinks they are funnier than they are. But Drucker is making a sharper claim than that. He is saying that even when people think they are being humble, even when they think they are owning their weaknesses, they are still mostly guessing. The picture in your head of what you are good at is not very accurate. Neither is the picture of what you are bad at.

If that is true, it raises a fairly uncomfortable question.

How would you actually know?

You cannot really trust your memory of past wins. We remember the wins that flatter us. You cannot really trust feedback from other people, because they are reading you through their own filters. You cannot really trust your performance reviews, because half of those are about politics. So what is left?

Drucker's answer is a method he called feedback analysis. The method itself is almost embarrassingly simple. You write down what you expect to happen before you make a decision. You seal it. Nine or twelve months later, you open it. You compare what actually happened to what you predicted. You repeat. After two or three years of doing this, the pattern of where you are right and where you are wrong becomes very clear. That pattern is what your strengths actually are.

There's a name for what this is doing. It is a slow, honest mirror. Your prediction is a tiny snapshot of who you thought you were when you decided. Your future self gets to compare that snapshot against what really happened. Memory cannot retouch a sealed prediction. The notebook keeps you honest in a way you cannot keep yourself honest in the moment.

What I find interesting is the time scale. Nine months. Most self-improvement advice is built for impatience — read this today, change tomorrow. Drucker is saying the opposite. Self-knowledge is not something you read your way into. It is something you accumulate, slowly, by writing down predictions and being wrong about them in interesting ways.

I want to sit with that before going further. The method itself is the easy part. What makes the method work is harder, and it is older than Drucker.

References

• Drucker, P. F. (1999). Managing Oneself. Harvard Business Review, 77(2), 64–74. (Reprinted January 2005). https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself