Slippery Slope: What to do with mastering the 7 Habits?
 

Normally when I write about the slippery slope I write with the benefit of hindsight. This forum gives me a calm sandbox to write in and experiment with the simple contrast between the 7 Habits book and a recent book titled "Happy City".

The 7 Habits book is one that every living person knows. If you use an online calendar then you are in the 7 Habits sphere of influence give or take. Are you happy?

The Happy City book seems to knock together the heads of the 7 Habits graduates and ask them if they like what they built? The profound question of a happy city has survived my mind for thirty-some years after sitting on a roof at a MTU frat party during winter.

That night was all good and well until the girl that I dated gushed over a recent graduate that got a job at Martin-Marietta. He returned to MTU to party and jumped from hood to trunk to roof of cars in a parked row and smashed them all. He was a rocket scientist. Fuck balls.

I beg of the 7 Habits graduates - please work together to build a Happy City. Happy cities are closer to home than MTU.

There will never be a 'happy city.' You cannot fix humanity by building anything.

Powerful. Thank you.

The fight over defining the word "anarchy" hit me when I saw a contrast between profit in publishing the "Anarchists Cookbook" vs. harmony in working together to build a village.

There are happy anarchists on both sides of the struggle. The Happy City book strikes me as the best definition of what both sides want to work together to construct. To recreate.

The 'seven habits' type stuff can make you better at striving hard to achieve your life goals. It cannot make you want to strive hard to achieve your life goals.

Is the whole anarchy thing about how we sometimes have problems with subordination?

Meh. I dunno.

A decade or so after I read 7 Habits I got into a discussion with coworkers about the habits. They made fun of me for being a six habits of partially successful people kind of guy. That was good and well. I am still digesting what Covey wrote about the power of saying no and what my cube mate told me was a good question to keep in the soul.

"What good can come of this?"

Anarchists are not happy. It's why they're anarchists.

On the other hand, rational anarchy is a path that wanders in and out of Happy City.

I am starting to understand the different shades of anarchy and the utility of anarchy in general. From a practical perspective I am attracted to a more constructive and local practice of anarchy. In that practice I destroy myself instead of others. IMO there is a parallel between local anarchy and the Golden Rule that people hunger to practice. Unfortunately explaining that parallel is not a profitable story so we get a more profitable and popular story of anarchy instead. That story sounds akin to "if it bleeds it leads."

Politics are frustrating enough when everything is going well. My most recent fascination is with the practice of writing goals. If leaders write bad goals then politics become exponentially more expensive and difficult to rein back in.

It will take me some time to digest your question. Here is my second attempt at answering. I will try to answer by asking if it is OK for me to rephrase your question. Are you asking whether the 'seven habits' type stuff is good at guiding people towards things that they want to maintain for generations? If so then we are working together on answering a question of policy magnitude.

Below is a screencap that shows how delicate a policy dance can be. Here is a link to the source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u49v...&feature=share

As an aging military brat I shared my screencap because it is a fair abstraction of my thoughts. Detroit, MI is on the left side of the river and Windsor, ON is on the right. What punched me in the chest between the two nations is how far right both of them are on the political spectrum and how tall their buildings are after about 240 years of integrating infinitesimal policy differences.

Which side of the river is more walkable and sustainable as a goal? Which goal would make a person wake up one morning and pull the covers over their head versus getting out of bed and striving one more day to maintain?

Tough stuff this perspective crap is. :D

Peace out! Party time over here.

Rational anarchy?

Care to expand.

Anarchy is just a messier way than Libertarianism to hand the whole shebang over to authoritarian bullies.

Professor Bernardo de la Paz.

OK, lots to discuss tonight.

To begin, I haven't made a deep or sincere study of the seven habits. Once years ago I took an abbreviated class therein. I formed the opinion that the seven habits could be summed-up as 1) figure out what you are supposed to be doing, and then 2) work very hard at it. Rules for strivers, in other words, probably incorporating some handy tips for striving better, but not of much use if one isn't of the striver cast of mind in the first place.

I'm sure many people for whom the 7 habits have proven useful and even important would reject my view as cynical and even asinine. They may even be right.

Anarchy is hard to discuss because the term itself can mean so many differernt things.

There is much more different than alike about the two sides of the river in the pic. The big difference is JURISDICTION. You see divides were the jurisdiction line creates big disparities elsewhere, as between New York City and New jersy, or Chicago and Indiana. In those cases, the jurisdiction proved more amenable to industrial development on the side seperated from the big metropolis.

I feel your pain. I did not hear of the 7 Habits book until it became popular culture. That was during the 1990s. Productive workers in the corporate realm became increasingly surrounded by "policemen" that carried day planners with abbreviated notations. As a software writer I hated those day planner carriers. IMO all they did was mindlessly push me to make more.

It took me about ten years to calm down and finally read the 7 Habits book. When I did it struck me as a well thought out piece of work. Unfortunately it appeared to me that the day-planner carriers and marketers only took away the mechanistic and profitable instructions from the book. Mr. Covey put a lot of his heart in that book, too, and those heartfelt parts seem to have been left on the shelf.

With regard to anarchy, it is a word that seems to represent the center of the onion in political speech. It's definition is hard to nail down but the word seems to represent an emotional aspect that all of us share - we want control of our little space on the dance floor.

My introduction to the word anarchy came via the book "The Anarchist Cookbook". I found it in a bargain bin and bought it because it had survivalist content that my Boy Scout side thought might be useful at some point. The book has a lot of other dark stuff in in, but on average I thought it was worth a buck or whatever I paid for it. Within a few years I learned that the book was a trophy and someone stole it. That was around 1985.

Now thirty-plus years after that theft I am beginning to understand hunger for information. At the same time my mind spins with how to protect from making mistakes with information that moves too freely or is too freely available. In the automotive engineering world it is common to write software that pushes against information that the sensors provide. To "rage against the machine" if you will. The purpose of that software is to provide a soft landing at a predictable condition in the event that the sensors stop making sense. That slight informational pushback might be considered rational anarchy in academic circles.

At the end of the day I find it more constructive to think about sharing a dance floor.

Peace!