Book #39: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a book that I previously dipped into, but never read thoroughly. It feels more like a book where you should plunge in to occasionally rather than trying to read cover to cover, but it was nevertheless enjoyable.
So, Stephen R. Covey lists seven different behaviours (no special reason, he explains) that can help the reader in life, and he applies them to business and parenting skills. He starts with winning personal victories, and follows it up with how to convince other people, and making sure that your actions create a "win/win" situation, i.e. where both parties benefit.
This felt like quite a wordy, long-winded book, so it was handy that Covey created a bullet point list of possible actions to take at the end of each chapter; it didn't feel like a book where I'd remember vast amounts of detail, but where I was able to have a few useful takeaways. His advice about writing a "personal mission statement" felt invaluable, and is something that I should probably try.
For me, the only negatives were firstly the fact that some of the analogies he used seemed to lack a point; for example, at one point he mentioned the actions of train conductors causing problems across Britain, but didn't explain how this happened, or why.
Also, there were a couple of issues that were probably unique to the Kindle version I was reading, as he did mention some appendices that I was unable to find, and there were a couple of tables that were too small to be legible.
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