In the mid-1930s, Peter Drucker was working as an investment banker in London.
He was good at his job. He had the skill set a banker needed. The future looked promising. Everything was going according to plan.
But later that year, he quit.
He explains:
People, I realized, were what I valued, and I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery. I had no money and no other job prospects. Despite the continuing Depression, I quit—and it was the right thing to do.
—Managing Oneself (HBR, 2005)
What makes his decision even more striking is that this was during the Great Depression.
He had little to no money, no other job waiting for him, and no clear leads for a new job either. As Drucker later explained, the problem was not that he lacked the ability to succeed in finance. He was exceptionally good at it. The problem was that what he was doing at the time did not fit what he valued.
Drucker eventually went on to become one of the most influential management thinkers of the twentieth century. He spent much of his life studying how people and institutions work, taught for decades, and published 39 books.
But none of this was planned when he left his banking job. All he really knew was that he cared about people. And almost all the work that came afterward reflected that.
Drucker’s story shows a distinction we usually struggle to make for ourselves:
Being good at something does not automatically mean you should build your life around it.
It’s easy to confuse our identity with our choices.
The Competence Trap
We tend to treat our abilities as evidence of a fitting career.
When you do something well, people take notice. Then they begin to appreciate it, and you become the reliable person for that kind of work. Eventually, you may be praised, promoted, or paid specifically because you keep doing it.
What started as a set of skills becomes a role, and then it becomes a career.
This can happen without you ever making a clear decision.
It’s like dominoes.
But, like the situation Peter Drucker found himself in, your own competence can become sort of a trap.
Leaving this trap becomes harder and harder over time because of all the constraints the world builds around you: status, security, certificates, and the expectations of others.
It’s like eating a raw mango.
From the outside, people may see a highly successful person who has reached the summit of their career. But from the inside, you’re wincing your way through it.
Of course, we can eat a raw mango. We just don’t like to.
This is one of those “big life problems” some of us find ourselves in after investing years in a career.
Sure, we can do what we do. We are even really good at doing it.
But we just don’t like to do it.
Four Different Questions
A useful way to think about career fit is to separate four things that we usually fuse into one word: strengths.
- Ability: Can you produce a good result?
- Interest: Do you want to keep doing it?
- Energy: Does doing it drain you or energize you?
- Value: Does this work feel worth doing in the first place?
The importance of separating these factors has appeared again and again in psychological research.
A major meta-analysis of 172 studies on fit at work found that person-job fit was strongly connected to job satisfaction and was also related to organizational commitment, intentions to quit, strain, and performance.
Fit, in other words, involves more than whether someone possesses the skills required to “do the work.”
Interests are also a major piece of this puzzle.
Another meta-analysis covering more than 60 years of research found that vocational interests were related not only to performance but also to persistence. The relationship was also stronger when a person’s interests matched the environment around them.
- You may be good at organizing people because you are highly conscientious, even if managing people exhausts you.
- You may be good at writing reports because you have learned—and like—to be precise, even if you would rather spend your time building or investigating something.
- You may succeed in a field because you can tolerate its particular demands better than the people around you.
But none of this means that every part of your work must be interesting or meaningful. It probably won’t be.
A job can simply provide stability and support a life you value outside it. Almost any worthwhile career path will also be full of dull, frustrating, and difficult periods.
So leaving a job whenever the work becomes a little tiring and cumbersome would not be the right move.
But it’s still important to see through the rewards that accumulate over time and recognize that competence should not necessarily be the final measure of career fit.
It’s better to focus on what we like, even if we’re not that good at it yet, rather than doing something we don’t really like simply because we have all the skills for it.
Because, in the long run, we are less likely to create our best work while doing something we dislike, no matter how talented we are.
We may keep doing it because we can, but we may never feel compelled to go the extra mile.
But if we spend more time on what we enjoy, even if we’re not great at it at first, we can eventually produce far more value, both for ourselves and for others.
This is exactly what Peter Drucker came to understand.
He did not leave banking because he could not do it.
He left because being able to do it was not a good-enough reason to give his life to it.
References
Drucker, P. F. (2005). Managing Oneself. Harvard Business Review.
Drucker Institute. About Peter Drucker.
Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of Individuals’ Fit at Work: A Meta-Analysis of Person-Job, Person-Organization, Person-Group, and Person-Supervisor Fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342.
Nye, C. D., Su, R., Rounds, J., & Drasgow, F. (2012). Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of Over 60 Years of Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 384–403.
