I basically write these reviews for myself, a way to hold myself accountable to reading a book a week for the entire year. It’s amazing to me that it’s already been 30 weeks into the year. July is coming to an end and I am astounded at the knowledge I have gained from the 30 books covered so far. I’m really excited about the next 22 weeks and in fact; the more I read, the more I realize that there is an every growing number of books that I need to read. Each week I try very hard to pull relevant information out of a book to positively impact my life. This week I realize that I’ve been sharpening my saw, working on the 7th Habit all year long.

52 Weeks of Book Reviews. Week #30 – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

I don’t often criticize an author instead, I attempt to be completely optimistic and find only the positive that can help me. I’ve read a lot of authors this year and if I were a real book critic I suspect that I would have found a lot of faults in almost all of these. I’m not a book critic, I’m a salesman and the first person I sell to everyday is me. I have to sell myself on the fact that reading more content in the form of books will be more valuable than watching T.V., reading blogs, playing video games or playing on social media. Stephen Covey does an excellent job of describing the most important activities in our life, the activities that don’t offer instant gratification but instead will lead to long term improvement, those Important but Non-Urgent tasks. Reading a book a week falls into this category for me, it probably does for most people. I have successfully tricked my mind into turning this activity into an Important and Urgent task by imposing this blog deadline on myself. I wonder what else I could trick my mind into doing?

The 7 Habits is a great book, pick it up. Apparently, over 25 million copies have been sold and for good reason, it all makes sense. Covey conveys his message and it’s stood the test of time. Use this book as the catalyst to do something great, or to just be great. We aren’t all going to be public leaders, CEOs, politicians or group leaders but we can all grow a little bit each and every day and strive to be just a little bit better than we were the day before.