THE NEWSPAPER by Peter Drucker

“The newspaper I worked for came out in the afternoon. We began work at six in the morning and finished by a quarter past two in the afternoon, when the last edition went to press.

So I began to force myself to study afternoons and evenings: international relations and international law; the history of social and legal institutions; finance; and so on.

Gradually, I developed a system. I still adhere to it. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics.

Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject, but they are enough to understand it. So for more than sixty years I have kept on studying one subject at a time.

That not only has given me a substantial fund of knowledge. It has also forced me to be open to new disciplines and new approaches and new methods—for every one of the subjects I have studied makes different assumptions and employs a different methodology.”