My boss gave me this 7 Habits of Highly Effective People calendar for Christmas as sort of a joke, because I’m disorganized. But the calendar doesn’t address organization, it is full of a lot of wooly sophistry. I tear a page off every day and marvel at what damn silly thing this guy won’t say next.
Take March 15th, for example. He says, “The way we see the problem is the problem.” This is not only wooly, it’s unproductively recursive. I take it we’re supposed to assume he simply means that problems are compounded by errors made in forming judgements about them. But I think that’s being awfully charitable given that there’s no reason he couldn’t have just said so, save for a dismissable bit of verbal irony. Instead I think I’m well justified in supposing that he doesn’t give this stuff much thought.
He started out pretty rocky on January 2 (I keep these tear-offs scattered about my desk to symbolize the principles of organization that the calendar is not teaching me) by saying, “We must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as the world we see, and understand that the lens itself shapes how we interepret the world.” With what shall I look at the lens, dear Liza, dear Liza? Again, I could extend charity and take it that he means that its useful to be aware of preconceptions which are applied in the formation of judgments. But why should the reader assume responsibility for the author’s clarity?
On March 6th, he said, “Spend time with your children now, one on one. Listen to them; understand them. Look at your home, at school life, at the challenges and the problems they’re facing…through their eyes. Build the Emotional Bank Account. Give them psychological air.”
Maybe if I’d read the book, this rhetoric wouldn’t seem completely ex recto. Emotional Bank Account? Well, I guess a bank account is meaningful metaphor. I could say I’ve seen people kite emotional checks. But it seems a little crass to use it to describe what we’re supposed to believe amounts to some kind of sincerity. A bank a better metaphor to talk about the Intellectual Checks Covey’s Intellectual Ass can’t cover.
Psychological air? Is that anything like fanning the breeze? It sure sounds like it.
February 21, the guru says, “Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.”
What does `starving a problem’ amount to if not ignoring it and hoping it will go away?
February 25th, “Marilyn Ferguson observed, `No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.’”
Since Marilyn Ferguson’s insights here are not especially original, nor her metaphor singularly clever, nor her language particularly beautiful or even interesting or at all unique, it’s not clear why he’s quoting her instead of just saying it in his own words. This looks like something a high school kid would quote to pad out his Works Cited page.
Do people actually pay money for advice of this kind?
