Page 165 - The Drucker Lectures

146 [ The Drucker Lectures

It’s a new environment. It’s different people. And if forces you to
remain adaptively innovative.
When I look at those college professors at age 43, I realize
that a good many of them should now do something else. They
are not going to produce those great scholarly books they talked
about 15 years ago. There were those two little magazine articles,
that’s all. They are no longer the greatest classroom teachers, if
they ever were. They have lost all flexibility, all elasticity. They
are stuck. Not in the routine. It shouldn’t be a routine. They are
stuck in their own kind of premature aging. And then I look
at the ones who are different. And almost without expectation,
here is that colleague at age 46 who is not a very great scholar
but he is still full of enthusiasm in his classroom. He runs one of
the Boy Scout troops on the side. And every weekend is a new
challenge. Nine-year-old boys are a new challenge every week-
end. He comes back from that weekend totally exhausted and
just full of ideas.
Keep that in mind. You need that outside activity precisely
because the job tends to become all embracing, precisely because
you take work home at night. But it’s also because the great ma-
jority of us reach the ceiling in terms of advancement and pro-
motion in our early forties.
You need something that is not routine, and you need to
build it into your life early—something that is meaningful to
you, that cause you believe in. Something where you can con-
tribute, where you can take leadership. Something where you
can say, “I’m making a contribution.”
At the same time, you should also learn to look at yourself
and assess, “When do I belong elsewhere? When do I not need
a parallel career but a second career?”
Go back not very long—make it a hundred years. At age 43,
that farmer in North Dakota was a very old man, and his wife
was a very old woman, if she was still alive. And he was no lon-