He who aims
to keep abreast
is for ever
second best.
- Piet Hein
I was not yet eighteen when, having finished high school, I left my native Vienna in Austria, and went to Hamburg in Germany, as a trainee in a cotton-export firm. My father was not very happy. Ours had been a family of civil servants, professors, lawyers, and physicians, for a very long time. He therefore wanted me to be a full-time university student, but I was tired of being a schoolboy, and wanted to go to work. To appease my father, but without any serious intention, I enrolled at Hamburg University in the law faculty.
In those remote days, the year 1927, one did not have to attend classes in Austria or Germany to be a perfectly proper university student. All one had to do was to obtain signatures of the professors in the registration book. For this, one did not even have to go to class. All one had to do was to give a small tip to the faculty messenger, who then went and sought the professors’ signatures.
The work as a trainee at the export firm was terribly boring, and I learned very little. It began at seven-thirty in the morning, and was over at four in the afternoon on weekdays and at twelve on Saturday. So I had lots of free time.
On weekends, two other trainees - also from Austria, but working in other firms - and I usually went hiking in the beautiful countryside outside of Hamburg, spending the night in a youth hostel, where, being officially students, we could obtain free lodging.
I had five weekday evenings all to myself in Hamburg’s famous City Library, which was almost next door to my office. University students were encouraged to borrow as many books as they wanted. For fifteen months, I read, and read, and read, in German and English and French.
Experience one: Goal and Vision - taught by Verdi
And then, once a week, I went to the opera. The Hamburg Opera was then, as it still is, one of the world’s foremost opera houses. I had very little money, as trainees were not paid, but for university students, the opera was free. All one had to do was to go there one hour before the performance. Ten minutes before the performance began, cheap seats remaining unsold were given out free to university students. On one of these evenings I went to hear an opera by the great nineteenth-century Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi - the last opera he wrote, in 1893, Falstaff.
It has now become one of Verdi’s most popular operas, but at that time it was rarely performed. Both singers and audiences thought it too difficult.
I was totally overwhelmed by it. I had had a good musical education as a boy, as the Vienna of my youth was an extremely musical city. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like this. I have never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.
When I made a study, I found, to my great surprise, that this opera, with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man aged eighty! To me, then just eighteen, eighty was an incredible age. I doubt that I even knew anyone that old. It was not a common age when life expectancies, even among healthy people, were around fifty or so. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at his age, a famous man and considered one of the nineteenth-century’s foremost opera composers, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one. "All my life as a musician," he wrote, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try."
I have never forgotten these words - they made an indelible impression on me. Verdi, when he was my age, eighteen, was of course already a seasoned musician. I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. At eighteen, I was as immature, as callow, as naive as an eighteen-year-old can be. It was not until fifteen years later, when I was in my early thirties, that I really knew what I was good at and where I belonged. But I then resolved that, whatever my life’s work would be, Verdi’s words would be my lodestar. I then resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up, but would keep on. In the meantime, I would strive for perfection, even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me.
Experience two: "The Gods can see them" - taught by Phidias
It was at about the same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I then read a story that conveyed to me what "perfection" means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He was commissioned around 440 BC to make the statues that to this day, 2,400 years later, still stand on the roof of the Parthenon in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition. The statues were universally admired, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. "These statues," the accountant said, "stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet, you have charged us for sculpturing them in the round, that is, for doing their backsides, which nobody can see."
"You are wrong," Phidias retorted. "The gods can see them." I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff, and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only "the gods" notice.
Whenever people ask me which of my books I consider the best, I smile and say, "The next." I do not, however, mean it as a joke. I mean it the way Verdi meant it when he talked of writing an opera at eighty in the pursuit of a perfection that had always eluded him. Though I am older now than Verdi was when he wrote Falstaff, I am still thinking and working on two additional books, each of which, I hope, will be better than any of my earlier ones, will be more important, and will come a little closer to excellence.
- Peter Drucker, Management
