This article was copied from the blog of someone I deeply respect. He is now in prison, and I hope he regains his freedom soon.

Companies will not really care about the long-term development of an employee’s career, and in a way, that is not their responsibility in the first place.

Knowledge workers need to become their own CEO, carve out their own place inside an organization, and know when it is time to change direction.

So the first step is to know yourself deeply:

1. Know your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Know how you learn.
3. Know how you work with other people.
4. Know what your values are.
5. Know where you can make a real contribution.

We have to learn to develop ourselves. We have to know where we belong if we want to make the greatest contribution, and we have to stay alert and engaged across a working life that may last fifty years. In other words, we need to know when to change jobs, and how.

What Are My Strengths?

In the past, people did not really need to know their strengths. Birth largely determined a person’s social position and occupation. The son of a farmer became a farmer; the daughter of a craftsman married another craftsman. But now people have choices. We need to know what we are good at before we can know where we belong.

Feedback Analysis

Whenever you make an important decision or take an important action, write down what you expect will happen. Then, nine to twelve months later, compare the actual result with your expectation.

Feedback analysis tells you a few things you need to do.

1. First, and most important, focus on your strengths. Put yourself where those strengths can actually be used.
2. Second, improve your strengths. Feedback analysis quickly shows where you need to sharpen a skill or learn a new one. It also shows gaps in your knowledge, and most of those gaps can be fixed. Mathematicians may be born, but anyone can learn trigonometry.
3. Third, identify any arrogance, prejudice, or ignorance created by talent, and correct it. Too many people, especially specialists, look down on knowledge outside their own field, or assume raw intelligence can replace knowledge. Many first-rate engineers freeze when faced with human problems, and some are even proud of that because they think people are too messy for an orderly engineering mind. On the other side, many HR professionals are proud of not knowing even basic accounting or quantitative analysis. Being proud of that kind of ignorance is just self-destruction. If you want your strengths to fully work for you, you need to keep learning new skills and new knowledge.

Another equally important thing is to correct your bad habits. A bad habit is anything that hurts your effectiveness or your performance. Feedback usually makes those visible very quickly.

Feedback also reveals problems caused by a lack of manners. Courtesy is the lubricant of an organization. When two moving objects come into contact, friction is natural. That is true not only of inanimate things but of people too. Courtesy can be as simple as saying “please” and “thank you,” remembering someone’s name, or asking about their family. Small details like these make it possible for people to work together smoothly, whether or not they actually like each other. Many smart people, especially smart young people, fail to see this. If feedback shows that someone repeatedly fails whenever cooperation is required, it often means the person’s behavior is off, in other words, that they lack basic courtesy.

Comparing expectation and reality also tells you what you are not good at. Every one of us has areas where we are completely untalented, places where we cannot even reach mediocrity. People, especially knowledge workers, should not try to take on work in those areas. They should waste as little energy as possible on fields where they are incompetent, because moving from incompetence to mediocrity takes far more effort than moving from first-rate to excellence. But most people, especially teachers and organizations, are obsessed with turning weak performers into acceptable ones. In fact, they would be better off spending their energy, resources, and time turning the competent into the outstanding.

How Do I Perform?

For knowledge workers, the question “How do I perform?” may be even more important than “What are my strengths?”

The way a person performs is unique, because it is rooted in personality. Whether personality is inborn or shaped later, it is already formed long before a person enters the workplace. Just as your strengths and weaknesses are more or less fixed, the way you work is also largely fixed. It can be adjusted a little, but it cannot be completely changed.

Reader or Listener?

The first thing to figure out is whether you are a reader, someone who takes in information best through reading, or a listener, someone who works best through hearing.

How Do I Learn?

The second part of understanding how you work is understanding how you learn.

Schools tend to operate as if there were only one right way to learn and everyone should follow it. But for students whose learning style does not match that method, school becomes a kind of hell. In reality, there are probably six or seven different ways of learning.

Among all the important forms of self-knowledge, knowing how you learn is one of the easiest to discover. When I ask people, “How do you learn?” most of them know the answer. But when I ask, “Have you adjusted your behavior accordingly?” very few say yes. And that alignment between knowledge and action is exactly what leads to achievement. Without it, people often end up doing very little.

Am I a reader or a listener? How do I learn? Those are the first questions you should ask yourself. But they are clearly not enough. To manage yourself well, you also need to ask: Do I work well with other people, or do I prefer to work alone? And if I can work with others, in what kind of relationship do I do my best?

Some people work best as team members. Others work best alone. Some are gifted as coaches and mentors. Others are not meant to teach.

Another key question is this: Do I produce results as a decision-maker, or as an adviser?

Many people perform brilliantly as advisers, but cannot handle the burden and pressure of actually making the decision. On the other hand, some people need advisers to force them to think, and only then can they decide and execute with speed, confidence, and courage.

By the way, this is also why a number-two person often fails after being promoted to the top role. The top job requires a decision-maker. A strong decision-maker often puts someone they trust in the number-two role as an adviser. That adviser may be excellent in second position, but once they are placed at the top, they fail. They may know what decision should be made, but they cannot bear the real responsibility of making it.

Other important questions that help self-understanding include:

1. Do I perform well under pressure, or do I prefer a predictable environment with a steady rhythm?

2. Do I work best in a large company, or in a small one?

3. Very few people perform well in every kind of environment.

Do not try to change yourself entirely, because that is unlikely to work. But you should absolutely work on improving the way you operate. And do not take on work you cannot do well.

What Are My Values?

If you want to manage yourself, the final question you have to ask is: what are my values? This is not simply a question of morality. Moral rules are the same for everyone. To test morality, there is a simple method. I call it the “mirror test.”

The ethical code we live by asks a simple question: What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror every morning? What counts as ethical behavior in one organization or situation should also count as ethical behavior in another. But morality is only one part of a value system, especially when it comes to the value system of an organization.

If the value system of an organization is not acceptable to you, or is incompatible with your own values, you will feel frustrated and your performance will suffer.

Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, your values must be compatible with its values. They do not have to be identical, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, you will not only feel unhappy, you will also fail to produce results.

The way a person works and their strengths rarely conflict. In fact, they usually reinforce each other. But a person’s values can sometimes conflict with their strengths. Someone may be doing work they do very well, even very successfully, and still feel that the work is not worth committing a life to, or even much energy to, because it does not fit their value system.

Where Do I Belong?

Some people know very early where they belong. Mathematicians, musicians, and chefs, for example, often know by age four or five what they are going to become. Physicists often decide in their teens, or even earlier. But most people, especially gifted people, do not know where they belong until at least their mid-twenties. By then, though, they should know the answers to the three questions we have already covered:

1. What are my strengths?

2. How do I perform?

3. What are my values?

Once they know those answers, they can decide where to put their energy. Or, just as importantly, they can decide where they do not belong.

Knowing the answers to those three questions also helps a person accept an opportunity, an invitation, or a task with clarity. They can say: “Yes, I will do this. But I will do it in a way that fits who I am. I will structure it this way, manage the relationships this way, and aim for these results within this time frame, because that is how I work.”

Successful careers are not planned in advance in detail. They develop when people know their strengths, their ways of working, and their values, and are ready to seize opportunity. Knowing where you belong can turn an ordinary person, diligent and capable but otherwise unremarkable, into someone outstanding.

What Should My Contribution Be?

Across most of human history, very few people ever needed to ask this question: what should I contribute? Their contribution was assigned by someone else, either by the work itself, as in the case of a farmer or craftsman, or by a master, as in the case of a servant.

Most people used to live in subordinate roles. They did what they were told, and that was considered natural. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, many knowledge workers, the so-called “organization man,” still expected the personnel department to plan their career for them.

But for knowledge workers, this is a question that can no longer be avoided: what should my contribution be? To answer it, they must think through three different factors:

1. What does the current situation require?

2. Given my strengths, my way of working, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?

3. What results must be achieved in order to make a real difference?

It is neither realistic nor especially effective to plan too far ahead. In general, if a plan stretches beyond eighteen months, it is hard to keep it concrete and clear. So in most cases, the better questions are:

1. In what areas can I produce results that will matter within the next year and a half?

2. How can I achieve those results?

There are a few tradeoffs involved in answering that.

First, the results should be difficult. Using current language, they should have “stretch.” But they should still be attainable. Setting a goal that cannot be reached, or can only be reached with a tiny chance of success, is not ambition. It is just foolishness.

Second, the results should matter. They should have impact.

Finally, the results should be visible, and if possible, measurable. Once you know what results you are aiming for, you can then work out a plan of action: what to do, where to begin, how to start, what the target is, and when it should be finished.

How Should I Manage Relationships?

With a few exceptions, like great artists, scientists, and athletes, almost nobody produces results entirely alone. Whether as part of an organization or as an independent professional, most people have to work with others, and work with them effectively. To manage yourself, you need to take responsibility for your relationships. That responsibility has two parts.

The first is accepting a simple fact: other people are individuals, just like you.

Everyone insists on expressing their own personality. That means everyone has their own strengths, their own way of working, and their own values. If you want to be effective, you need to know the strengths, working styles, and values of the people you work with. This sounds obvious, but very few people truly pay attention to it.

A typical example is someone who got used to writing reports in their first job because their boss was a reader. Even if their next boss is a listener, they keep writing reports that are guaranteed to go nowhere. That boss will naturally think the employee is stupid, incompetent, or lazy. But that situation could have been avoided if the employee had first studied the new boss and understood how that boss worked.

A boss is not just a title on an org chart, nor a “function.” A boss is a person, with the right to work in the way that suits them best. The people who work with that boss are responsible for observing them, understanding how they work, and adjusting themselves accordingly. In fact, that is the secret of managing your boss.

The same applies to everyone you work with. Every person has their own way of doing things, and they have the right to work in their own way, not yours. What matters is whether they can produce results and what values they hold. Working style differs from person to person. The first secret to effectiveness is understanding the people you work with and depend on, so you can make use of their strengths, working styles, and values. Work relationships need to be built on both the work and the person.

The second part of relationship responsibility is communication.

Whenever I or others begin consulting for an organization, the first thing we usually hear about is personality conflict. Most of those conflicts come from one simple fact: people do not know what others are doing, how they are doing it, what contribution they are focused on making, or what results they are expected to deliver. And the reason they do not know is that nobody asked.

This failure to ask is less a sign of stupidity than a result of history.

In earlier times, people did not need to explain these things to anyone. In a medieval town, everyone in one district often practiced the same trade. In the countryside, once the ground thawed, everyone in the valley planted the same crop. Even when a few people did something different, they usually worked alone and had no need to explain what they were doing.

Today, however, most people work alongside others with different tasks and responsibilities. A vice president of marketing may have come from sales and know everything about sales, but know almost nothing about pricing, advertising, or packaging if they never did those jobs themselves. So the people doing that work must make sure the VP understands what they are trying to do, why they are doing it, how they will do it, and what results they expect.

If the VP of marketing does not understand what those high-level specialists are doing, that is mainly the fault of the specialists, not the VP. On the other side, the VP is responsible for making sure colleagues understand how he sees marketing: what his goals are, how he works, and what he expects from himself and from everyone else.

Even when people understand the importance of relationship responsibility, they often do not communicate enough with coworkers. They worry that they will seem intrusive, foolish, or nosy. They are wrong. In practice, whenever someone says to a colleague, “Here is what I am good at. Here is how I work. Here are my values. Here is the contribution I plan to make and the results I should be delivering,” the usual response is: “This is so helpful. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

And if that person continues by asking, “Then what do I need to know about your strengths, your way of working, your values, and the contribution you plan to make?” they get a similar answer almost every time: “Thank you for asking. Why didn’t you ask sooner?”

Organizations are no longer built on force. They are built on trust. And trust does not necessarily mean that people like one another. It means they understand one another. That is why taking responsibility for your relationships is not optional. It is an obligation. Whether you are an employee, a consultant, a supplier, or a distributor, you owe that responsibility to everyone you work with, meaning everyone you depend on and everyone who depends on you.

How Do I Manage the Second Half of My Life?

There are three ways to build a second career.

The first is to shift fully into a new job. Often that simply means moving from one kind of organization to another.

The second is to develop a parallel career.

Many people are highly successful in their first career and continue doing it, either full-time, part-time, or as consultants. But alongside it, they begin another line of work, usually in a nonprofit, and devote perhaps ten hours a week to it.

The third method is social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurs are often people who were very successful in their first career. They still love their work, but it no longer challenges them in the same way. In many cases, they continue with their original work while gradually giving it less time, and at the same time build a second undertaking, usually nonprofit in nature.

The people who manage the second half of life well will always be a minority. Most people will simply keep going, year after year, until retirement. But it is exactly this minority, the men and women who see a long working life as an opportunity for themselves and for society, who become leaders and examples.