Living a highly effective story
Or seven habits to a good subplot, or some such thing.
Around other goings on at the moment I have been squeezing in some of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. I have had a number of conversations about this book in the last few months, and after one in particular, with a guy from my connect group who quit his job with an engineering firm to start his own business, I downloaded a free pdf when I had that road-tripping holiday. But I am not so good at reading pdfs on my computer (I have to do that at work, so I don’t feel like doing it at home). But then after reading Dave MacDonald’s review of the book, I thought it might be worth adding to the real book piles with this one.
Simultaneously, I decided to have a look at Don Miller’s Storyline material, because, the truth is, the very title The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People bores me, and is enough to make me not want to read that book, but Storyline - Finding Your Subplot in God's Story, well that is closer to lighting my fire. I am not especially goal-setting, list-writing person and I don't want to read books with bullet points. Not interested. (Though of course I do read those books, because every second Christian book is full of sub-headings or bullet points.) But stories, I am enthralled.
What is curiously serendipitous so far is that both books draw heavily from Victor Frankl’s work and his logotherapy, which is essentially (or at least in part) about our “response-ability”. There is more to be read on that. I have currently only read the first habit of the book, on being proactive (i.e. act, don’t sit back and let yourself be acted on, or play the victim), so I won’t write a half-baked post now, but to say I am so far enjoying it, because it’s about principle-centred living (read Dave’s review) and not about how to get rich and make people like you etc (once again, not interested). Cath has also, serendipitously, quoted a quote I just read in Seven Habits, from Malcolm Muggeridge, and linked it to the hymn More Love To Thee, because that is possible in how you use the book, with what you put in your centre and which values shape your principles.
2012 has not ended so well, so I am going to go away with these books and reinvent myself in 2013 (well, you know, at least try to do differently some of the things it is within my power to do differently).
In more immediate (and pressing!) news, in some more optimistic moment I said I would muster up what is left of my connect group for this year and have a Christmas dinner together, so tonight I am going to see what I can do with a turkey breast. Wish me luck.