Wisdom from Peter Drucker

This morning, with a black fountain pen in one hand and a cup of coffee in another, I found myself pouring over a copy of Peter Drucker's famed treatise Management. Despite the almost incomprehensible amount of books that I've read over the years, it's amazing when a great piece of wisdom presents itself and has the power to change your life. Drucker makes an observation so basic in its truth that if you truly grasp it and put the idea into place in your own life, it can help you achieve everything you want - from learning to play the piano to building a $20 million portfolio.

Here's what Peter Drucker taught me this morning:

But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today - and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow - they are dreams, if not pretexts for non-thinking, non-planning and non-doing.

Think about that. It does and means nothing for you to say, "I'm going to build a fortune," or "I'm going to get in shape." Instead, it only matters the actions you take today. He goes on to say that one of the primary goals of management, both in business and of yourself, is to identify the resources that you need to commit today in order to achieve your goals, accomplishments, and dreams tomorrow. But he points out, it all comes back to what you can do now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not even in ten minutes. What you can do now. That is extraordinarily powerful. It's life changing.

What can you do now about your credit cards? Your investments? Your debt levels? Your education? Your art collection? Your children? Your friends and family? Your health? What can you do now?

I think I'm going to have it framed at headquarters so we can read it every day.