A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

36 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
journalist, and found a job teaching part-time at Sarah Lawrence College
in New York. From this timeline, he was still a freelance journalist at the
time of his meeting <strong>with</strong> the colonel. He then accepted an appointment at
Bennington College in Vermont as a professor of political science. 3
In summary, by the time of his meeting <strong>with</strong> the colonel, although he
was only about thirty, <strong>Drucker</strong> had already interacted <strong>with</strong> well-known
intellectuals, completed a successful apprenticeship for a business, written
articles which were good enough to be published, worked as a freelance
journalist in three different countries, worked as a securities analyst for an
insurance company, as a journalist for a newspaper, and as an economist
for a bank, was a youth leader for a major political party, wrote a book
acclaimed by a major political figure in England, and completed a doctorate
degree. No wonder <strong>Drucker</strong> had the self-confidence to speak forcefully
and successfully to the colonel. The colonel might have been the one who
was intimidated had he known everything about <strong>Drucker</strong>.
One could write the whole thing off to <strong>Drucker</strong>’s good fortune in parents
or his native genius. But there are thousands of men and women who
had these same advantages of parent, genius, and more. Yet few of them
became “<strong>Drucker</strong>s,” and a good many of them squandered their advantages.
Others <strong>with</strong>out these advantages, but <strong>with</strong> the self-confidence of a
<strong>Drucker</strong>, go on to great and near-great accomplishments.
Self-Confidence Is Based on Past Success
One manual on leadership says, “No man can have self-confidence if not
convinced in his own mind that he is qualified to perform the job he is
assigned.” 4 In other words, if you know that you can succeed at something,
then you will automatically have self-confidence that you can do it.
That’s a big advantage in any situation. That’s why Peter was so self-confident
in dealing <strong>with</strong> the colonel, even though he only guessed at what a
management consultant really did.
There is an old saying that “nothing succeeds like success.” This means
that success breeds success, or that if you have been successful in the past,
you have a better chance of being successful, or at least will tend to be successful
in the future. That’s at least partly because you gain confidence <strong>with</strong>
every success. That’s how <strong>Drucker</strong> did it. But how can you become successful
until you are successful the first time? It’s like the chicken and the egg.
You can’t have a chicken until you have an egg, but you can’t have an egg
until you have a chicken. It sounds like an impossible contradiction.