I would like to say a few things about this book and the "genre", the category it fits in, the self help books in general, mainly because each text is a product of its format and its style greatly influences its content. As with many, if not all, so called self help books this book is marred the following key problems or flaws:
1. It states and then repeats over and over again, overemphasizing to the point of tedium, the obvious and the common sense wisdom, failing to capture the finer details of the proposed subject and thus missing out on all the important variations of life. In this way it midguides the reader, forcing them to believe that the theory is the life they live in and that the map is indeed the territory.
2. It uses in mostly anecdotal (i.e. incidental) evidence and no scientific, philosophical, literary or other basis as a foundation and is thus very unreliable in the information it provides and can only justify its title (i.e. that it is actually helpful for oneself) if the reader accepts the whole system of thought and frame of mind of the author, his beliefs and values, his or her personal history and assigned meaning in life etc, otherwise it is useless. Missing out on the finer details as i mentioned in the first point i made, these book actually demand that the person replicates his or her self as an offshoot of the writer, allowing for little variety and imagination, and creative spirit, in life. The "wisdom" one can possess after reading such books can be found elsewhere in a more scientific and sinsere manner. Which brings me on to my next point.
3. These types of books are full of misconceptions and oversimplifications of psychological, philosophical, religious and otherwise spiritual works. They gratuitously ransack the good library books from their knowledge and wisdom and, with no references, they go about incorporating these elements to their own writing with different name tags or slightly modified content. Hence, the skill to read and understand any form of printed material, ranging from literature to poetry and from philosophy to science, and being able to adjust these skills to the text one is reading, becomes renamed as speed reading and most recently mutates to kevin treudau's ( i don't know if i 've spelt the name correctly) photoreading. Hypnosis skills get a yuppie make-over and turn into nlp, or some new age crap.
4. Most of them attempt to change the readers mind frame with positive hypnosis and affirmations and do not provide a long lasting effect so to speak, so it is not the info they provide that causes any effect one might have but the influence it exerts on the reader
5. Lastly, and this is a key point I am trying to make here, they are nothing but huge public relations enterprises, as other reviewers have mentioned before me, with the sole purpose of making the author rich and famous and his or her books best-sellers.
There are plenty other flaws one can point out but I 'll stay with these due to the lack of time and space.
About this book in particular. It is priviled enough to have each and every one of the above errors and a few unique ones. First of all, the author is in many cases patronising and bosses the reader around into believing his claims. I wonder is such a relationship or reader and auhor, one of command and subordination an "empowering" one to use one of the most loved terms of Covey. When I first read it in my public library I was astounded at how much of this book reads as gospel, a sacred definitive text on the human condition. With not a hint of distrust towards the validity of its claims or its0 historicity (i.e. it being just a product of a certain time and place, a society and a culture, an individual and hir or her souroundings.) For god's sake, even the number seven has mythical connotations as it is a "magic" symbolic number one finds in various cultures around the world. The main ideas of the book, the responsibility of the individual - a main existential idea of choice and commitment one can fully understand, grasp and practise in the works of sartre, neitsche, heidegger, ortega y gasset et al in philosophy and frankl, binswater, rollo may et al. (in fact Covey name drops some of this existential thinkers in but in a fragmeted, quotes out of context fashion) in existential psycotherapy, the second habit the one of "begining with the end in mind" and commiting themselves and "personal meaning" is again an existential offshoot and over-simplification of the human task to enhance the self, act rather than be acted upon, and assigning meaning to ones life, the third one "first things first" i.e. applying some sort of perspective in ones life and prioritizing is just plain common sense and i will not go in it, the next one to think win win, to care for your relationships with other people is straight forward moralism with no substance if applied the way he understands it and to care for the others as a means of achieving your goal of success is just too opportunistic and deceitful for my tastes, next listen empathically - well, well that's an original thought bravo mr. covey now how long did it take you to come to this conclusion, well, not enough space left due to the 1000 word limit, anyway you can imagine the rest...
This book as any other this talentless hack has written is an insult to the human mind and complexity, it chews and digests a wealth of knowledge, our human testament, and spits out an incoherent blather to the reader. Please, if you are not the narrow-minded yuppie sell-out success and control freak, but a wel meaning human being in every sense do not read this, or skim through it at the library at least. Try literature, or theatre or a good therapist or a good friend, or buy a book on existential psychology.
Thanks a lot to amazon for the space and to you for your time and effort, hope this review has something to say
