Cultivate GREATNESS | Leadership Training & Life Hacks

“The most important instruction I received was when I was just 20 and three weeks into my first real job as a foreign affairs and business editor of the large-circulation afternoon paper in Frankfurt. I brought my first two

editorials to the editor-in-chief, a German. He took one look at them and threw them back at me saying, ‘They are no good at all.’ After I’d been on the job for three weeks, he called me in and said, ‘Drucker, if you don’t improve radically in the next three weeks, you’d better look for another job.’

“For me, that was the right treatment. He did not try to mentor me. The idea would have been considered absurd. The idea of mentoring was post- World War II. In those days [before World War II] you were hired to do your job, and if you didn’t do it, you were out. It was very simple.”