The starting point of maturity is the realization that “No one is coming to the rescue.” Everything you are or ever will be is entirely up to you.

This life is not a rehearsal for anything else. This is the real thing. The game is on. Time is passing quickly, and all of your decisions and indecisions, your actions and inactions, have added up to create the life you’re living at this very minute. If you want things to be different in the future, you’ll have to make things different in the present. You’ll have to take complete charge of yourself and your life and make things change, because they won’t change by themselves.

Self-management is really personal management, time management, life management. It’s putting your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your life and then taking yourself in your chosen direction. Remember the old Confucian saying, “If you don’t change the road you’re traveling on, you’ll probably end up where you’re going.” Every successful man or woman in America made, at one time or another, a firm decision about where he or she wanted to go and then took deliberate steps to get there. And you can do this for yourself as well.

One of the most useful ideas I ever learned was to view myself as a “bundle of resources.” You can benefit from this idea by standing back and looking at yourself in terms of what you are, instead of what you do. We tend to define ourselves in terms of our work, in terms of what we’re spending most of our time doing at the present moment. When we meet someone, even at a bus stop, we describe ourselves in terms of our jobs. We say things such as “I’m a salesperson,” “I’m a manager,” or “I work in such-and-such a business doing such-and-such a job.” Since we tend to become what we think about, the more we describe ourselves to others as being what we do, the more we think of ourselves as what we do. Perhaps this is why people who are fired or laid off go through a period of shock and emotional turmoil. it’s as though they’ve been cut off from their identities. You may have had that experience.

The fact is that you’re not what you do. Instead, you’re a bundle of resources. You have the combination of ingredients that makes you a unique and remarkable human being, different from anyone else who ever has lived or who ever will live. You’ve undergone a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative. You’ve had a formal education, and you’ve learned from the various jobs and activities that you’ve engaged in. You have a unique intelligence, much of which isn’t yet developed to the full. You have skills that you’ve acquired through hard work, discipline and practice. You have abilities that you were born with, which make it easy for you to do certain jobs and to accomplish certain tasks. You have energy and ambition and goals and opportunities. You have a philosophy of life, however developed it is, and you have attitudes and perspectives that make you extraordinary. The federal government has identified more than 22,000 different job categories; when you put all your skills together, you’re probably capable of excelling at hundreds of jobs, doing different things in different organizations, businesses and industries.

As the psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The average person tends to settle for far less than he’s capable of and then wonders why he’s so dissatisfied and frustrated with his life.

The fact is that you have an inborn drive toward the realization of your full capacity. There’s a force within you that makes you restless and discontent, and that drives you onward and upward toward the achievement of your dreams and aspirations. Many people attempt to deaden that ambition by drinking too much alcohol, watching too much television, socializing too much and even resorting to drugs and dangerous activities. But it will not be denied. You have been put in this world to do something wonderful with your life. You have a unique destiny, a special purpose. And the starting point for realizing that purpose is self-management. It is taking full control over yourself and everything that you are doing so that you are moving progressively toward the realization of a worthy ideal, so that you are firmly on the road toward becoming everything you are capable of becoming.

In self-management, you begin by accepting that you are self-employed. You work for yourself. No matter who signs your paycheck, no matter if you’ve worked for a company all your life, you are always self-employed. You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You go out into the marketplace and sell your services to the highest bidder, but you always work for yourself.

One of the great tragedies of our educational system is that almost everyone is brought up to think of himself as an employee rather than an employer, as a company-owning entrepreneur. This attitude that most people accept unquestioningly is a major cause of unhappiness and underachievement in life. The myth of the employee leads people to see themselves as helpless and dependent. From an early age, they look for someone to provide them with work to do and money to live on. They see themselves as cattle being herded into the barn every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to be milked and then sent back to the pasture to graze and prepare for the next day’s milking. When you accept complete responsibility for your life and begin to view yourself as self-employed, you automatically move into the top 3 percent of employed men and women in America.

At the point where you see that you’re in charge of your working destiny, you begin to realize that self-management is the vehicle that you need to take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. You’re not a passive passenger. You’re not an idle dreamer. You’re not subject to the whims and fancies of fate and circumstance. You’re in charge. You determine your own cause of action. You decide where you want to work and what you want to do. Then you, first, prepare yourself and, second, go out to get the job that most satisfies you and allows you to use yourself to your best advantage. You start the process of self-management by looking deeply into yourself and asking, “What do I most enjoy doing? What have I most enjoyed in my work and activities in the past? If I won $1 million in cash tomorrow, what would I choose to work at for the indefinite future?”

Imagine, for a moment, that someone has offered to give you any job in the world and to pay you well at it if you can define that ideal job clearly on paper. By the way, most people find this to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Most people are so used to accepting the job that is offered to them that the very idea of defining and determining their own job is somewhat overwhelming. But don’t worry. The more often you think about it and jot down your ideas, the clearer it will become to you. Then the most remarkable thing will happen: As a result of your being absolutely clear about what you want to do, you will find yourself moving toward your ideal job, and your ideal job will begin moving toward you.

Another way to determine your purpose in life, once you have accepted complete responsibility for yourself and begun seeing yourself as self-employed, is strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers are those who take the time to sit down and work out where they are and where they want to go. They determine how to achieve their goals in a step-by-step fashion. They look into the future and think about how they could allocate themselves as a bundle of resources to most rapidly move toward the accomplishment of their desires.