Over the summer I´ve been reading “7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens”, as you already know, if you have read my previous blog post. After reading some chapters I decided to see what my peers thought about the book. So far, I felt that the book was okay but only had read about three chapters.
Two types of answers were the result of my “book survey”, both answers a bit extremist. It either was “It was soooo good! I actually like it!” or “This the most clichéd book I´ve read, literally everything in here I have heard.” I believe that in the process of reading the book or any self-help book and finishing them, people develop a perspective about the book, kind of like a personality. In which there are two types, the negative one and the positive one. Now… I started to wonder which of these perspectives towards the book would be mine. Deciding to skip to part two I started reading again, six pages in and I was just soooooo freaking bored it was like I was reading a children´s book. Million examples filled pages to explain an idea that was said in ONE sentence. I realized I had a negative perspective, though more of a realistic one, when I think about it. Though I gave this book a second chance, maybe it was the chapter or I wasn´t in the mood to read. After reading some pages I realized it was the book not me. Going deeper into the book and to the “why” of this negativity, I decided to list the reasons why this book was so torturing to read. 1. The “solutions” or “baby steps” Covey suggests are utterly unrealistic. One example is “Before you go to bed tonight, write a simple message of apology to someone you may have offended”. By the time you´re going to sleep you´ll forget all baby steps, including this one, plus no teenager would ever do this. Or nobody is going to take like an hour to do a list of things to make a goal that most probably will leave aside and forget about it. This and other suggestions are just stupid and things that no one will ever do. He is just too optimistic and takes everything as unicorns and rainbows. His solutions are too simplistic and out of common sense to problems that are often more complicated. 2. The anecdotes and the cartoons, oh I wanted to kill myself. They just add more pages to the book. The cartoons are poor attempts at humor or a proxy for that teacher who tries to act young to get on the kid´s good side. While a habit can take up to 48 pages they could have easily been explained in two pages and the whole book in 20 pages. I can´t think of anything less productive than to read a book of 265 pages about how to be productive. 3. EVERYTHING I repeat, EVERYTHING he says hasn´t already been said. “Begin with the end in mind” or another way of saying, “Set goals”. “Seek first to understand then to be understood” or another version of “Be open-minded, listen to others first”. Though they are presented in a fresher way they feel like the posters that perhaps are in your room telling you to follow your dreams, things that you always hear but never actually pay attention to. I would recommend this book to people that see the world though rose-colored glasses and have no common sense.
1 Comment
Bon
2/29/2016 12:59:25 pm
Cri, your survey is quite spot-on. In fact if you read the different blogs you'll see that many would agree with you. You bring out some great points. At times, though it sounds more like a rant than an actual review of the book. There's nothing wrong with blasting the book, but you need to persuade the reader that the author missed out on a great opportunity to SPEAK to the youth. What type of book do young people need?
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Cristina BarclayCurrent eleventh grader at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt, taking the IB diploma program. Archives
May 2016
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