7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Paperback)

Now I work for myself and have time to consider things more thoroughly, I realised that this book was partly responsible for me making myself thoroughly miserable.

It's fine to be an "effective" person - but what about your happiness? And the people around you? Is that not far more important than simply being "effective"? This book is grey and uninspiring because - although substantially better than most similar books - you still risk being turned into an automaton with regard to how you organise your life.

The first step in the book revolves around planning what people will say about you at your funeral. Well, interesting idea, but as you get older your values change. I've been "road testing" this book for three years now. I've now given up. I realise now that life is far more enjoyable when you are riding the crests of its waves, than if you spend your time locked up in a stuffy room pouring over your weekly diary, philosophising about what is the most "effective" way of slicing your life into neat half-hour chunks.

Too much emphasis on speculating on the future in todays society means few people are living life for the moment, and even fewer are fully tuned into the thoughts and feelings of those around them at any particular time.

I no longer recommend this book. As the old cliche goes: "Life is what happens whilst you are planning something else".

Jezar.

Let me be quite blunt - this is probably one of the five worst books I've ever read.

Last time I looked, sales figures on this book stood at 15 million plus. But just because you buy a book doesn't mean you read it, at least not all the way through. And it is my belief that very few of those 15 million buyers will have read this turgid nonsense from cover to cover.

The first red light came on as I read, in the Acknowledgement section, that Covey had based the book on work done as part of "a doctoral program" in the mid seventies. The work in question was a review of "the success literature published in the United States since 1776".

Red light number 2 appeared when Covey went on to say that he doesn't think much of "the success literature of the past 50 years" which he regards as "superficial ... social band-aids and aspirin".
If we believed this claim, we would haqve to suppose that this is actually just a warmed over summary of American success literature from 1776 to 1926.
But hang on a minute, if the good stuff all happened before 1926, what are all these references to Peter Drucker, Marilyn Ferguson, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, Alvin Toffler, etc., etc? And what is the justification for the half-baked guide to left brain and right brain thinking?

Red light number 3 flashed on as I began to realise that I never was going to find out who these allegedly "highly effective people" are.
Which means that I have no way of finding out whether they are actually effective in any way I'd want to emulate.

Actually I guess that's not entirely accurate.
Whilst we are never given the names of any of these "highly effective" individuals, we can at least get a fairly clear idea as to what sort of people they are.

On pages 86-88, for example, we are told that being proactive is better than anything. Particularly if your boss is an ignorant tyrant, in which case you should proactively start sucking up to him before anyone else gets in as No. 1 yes man.

You should also learn to practise emotional blackmail wherever you can. Treat other people nicely, so that they always "owe you one", especially your friends and relations (Covey calls this creating an "emotional bank account"!) (pp.188-202).

Is that *really* what it takes to be a "highly effective person"?
Personally I think this book should have a warning: "This book can seriously damage your mental health" stamped on every page.