This month I introduce a new category, Reviews. This category will feature a review of the books I have read, seminars I attended and courses I have followed over the past years and in the future. I don’t read any novels, only self improvement books, wealth books, investing books and other books that I feel will give me more of an edge in becoming successful. The same holds for seminars and courses. Forget the technical stuff, I am interested in marketing, accounting, wealth building and entrepreneurial seminars and courses only. But without further ado; the review!
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is the book I would recommend almost anyone to read. Simply put, this is the book of books. Forget the Secret, The Four Hour Work Week and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Read this first. Actually, forget about this review (you will be forgiven just this once), jump straight to Amazon.com and go order your copy. This book is too important for you to procrastinate for even a second!
Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey reviewed 200 years of success literature and combined what he learned into 7 habits that took the world by storm in 1989. But the beautiful thing is that he learned how success works first hand. Being a researcher, he used to be buried in his books. Here he was, the most knowledgeable person in the world when it comes to being successful, yet he wasn’t successful. That is when it hit him and he started to write his book and give his seminars. The rest is history.
Define Success
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will have probably read posts about defining success (I call success what you would probably define as ‘wealth’) and finding meaning in your life. Well, I got the idea behind those kind of posts from this book. The first thing that Covey will have you do, is find your purpose in life. Without knowing your purpose in life, how can you ever be successful?
Compare it to throwing a dart. If you are fully blindfolded and have no guidance whatsoever (you don’t even know how far away the board is!) how in the world are you going to be hitting the bull’s eye?! Well, that is exactly what living without knowing your true purpose or meaning in life is. This book will have you figuring this out.
Self Improvement
The next part of the book is about self-improvement. Covey calls this Private Victories, but it is the same thing. If you want other people to find you successful, you will have to change yourself so others can find you successful. Success, like everything else, comes from within. If you are one of those people who blaim everyone and everything in the world (I know many, MANY people who constantly do this), then do yourself a favor. For once in your life, instead of making excuses, go pick up this book and read it thoroughly. It will definately change your life!
Once you have begun the changes from within, wonderful things will happen. You will understand more of how other people act and behave. You will see that by acting in a certain way, you can get others to behave in ways that suit you. It is simply amazing.
Reaping the Success
Once you have mastered the Private Victories, you can go on to the Public Victories. These are actions that influence other people more directly. But they still come from yourself. There are so many little gems in this book that I would find myself simply copying the whole book here if I was going to tell everything that I liked. But I’ll give you this one that influences the way you will think about relations:
A relation is like a bank account balance. The bank account can be positive, meaning you have credit, or it can be negative, meaning you’re in debt. The currency of this bank account is emotional value. You can add emotional value by doing something nice, for example, buy flowers for your spouse. This adds credit to your account. However, there are also actions that deduct from your account. For example, breaking a promise.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
You can get this book in almost any language (I read it in Dutch actually), but the language doesn’t make the book any less of a gem. Here is a link to the English version of the book on Amazon. If you are interested in this book even slightly, do your self a favor and go get it. I promise it will change your life forever, in a good way!
Mon, Dec 7, 2009
Reviews