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“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”
To read my Amazon.com review, click here.
I wish authors would consider the reading and intellectual level of the audience before writing. Maybe this author did. Perhaps most of his audience are in academia and possess PhDs. Regardless, I’m a college graduate working in healthcare (and an occassional actor), and I can honestly say I found this book quite difficult to understand. It was like, after I’m finished with the end of a chapter, I forgotten what this chapter was about. The stories were somewhat interesting, though.
Regardless, after reading this book (and re-reading parts of it), I came away with this very, very brief summary of what this entire book is all about:
(1) Realize that there are things you can control (your “circle of influence”) and things you really can’t control (“circle of conern”) and successful people work withing their circle of influence. Work on controlling your behavior and attitude.
(2) Decide what you want based on your values and beliefs (your principles).
(3) After you control yourself, realize you have control of your situation and become independent, you can then work with others and establish “interdependence” which is where two independent people, working together establishing greater things. But first you need to establish independence, which is working on improving yourself and becoming a better person.
From here, there are various methods he gives in which helps you work with people better, such as how to understand people by listening (hardly an innovative idea. I mean… only about 538 other self-improvement and conflict management books say this) and establishing win-win situations (ideally), although sometimes other situations may be more appropriate.
Overall, the information in this book is not bad. Granted, it may not be original, but it’s not bad. Some parts, I really like, such as the circle of influence and circle of concern and how, by working on your circle of influence, you can actually expand it and narrow your circle of concern. If this is still too complicated, think of it as this: before you can influence others, work on influencing yourself first. The part about time management is not bad (when I looked at it again) and I can see where the “4 quadrant” scheme (as I like to call it) can actually apply to my work-place and life in general (with modifications, of course). By the way… Raymond LeBlanc’s book, “Achieving Objectives Made Easy! Practical goal setting tools & proven time management techniques” uses the same quadrant scheme, but I believe he said he got it from this book. That being said, I will say that he didn’t have to make it that complicated.
And again, that’s the problem with this whole book is how the author takes some time-tested, simple principles and over-complicates it by adding these big words and phrases. I’m not sure they’re even scientific words or phrases. Even so… when people can’t understand what you’ve written, it’s hard to learn, much less apply anything.
Not to be funny or anything, but the author talks about seeking to understand first, then to be understood. Well, when I first read this book (and probably for alot of other people, too), all I can say is, I’m was still trying to understand!
That was my one problem with this book. The other? It seems the author tends to rely on “ideal situations” just to make a point. That’s not just with him, but with alot of self-help and personal development books. For example: going back to what the author said about empathic communication, he uses a fictional scenario regarding a father/son situation, where the son is telling the father that he wants to be a mechanic and drop out of school. How does dad get the son to reconsider? He listens to the son and rephrases what the son says and suddenly the son discovers the errors of his ways and decides to stay in school, where he makes Deans List!!!
OK… the part about Dean’s List I added. But my point is, it would be nice if the son does decide to stay in school, BUT, let’s say that after using empathic communication and listening, the son STILL decides he wants to be a mechanic or jock or barroom bouncer or whatever? What’s the backup plan? Is there even a backup plan? Again, I’m not just saying that’s the case with this book. Most self-help books do give ideal situations to prove their point when in “real life”, there’s about 23,759 different scenarios that can actually happen (give or take). Hence the difference between what you read in books (and learn in school) and what you encounter in the real world.
On another note: the part about win/win or no-deal is a very, very good example of something that could represent a real-life scenario.
On the other note, I did like how he went into the different aspects of communication, that only 10% is words, 30% by sound and the rest by our body. Although, this is covered more in detail in NLP and books such as NLP: The New Technology of Achievement.
Don’t get me wrong. I would like to give this book a higher rating. I just wish think the author could have gotten his point(s) across much better without overcomplicating most of everything.
Related Articles
- A Habit of Mind – Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits (deenar116.wordpress.com)
- The Focus on Perfection and Results. (practicalgoalachieving.com)
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