Course Notes

---

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a #1 National Bestseller book on personal development, written by Stephen R. Covey. It has sold more than 15 million copies since its first publication in 1989.

In this book Covey describes seven habits of successful people. Habits are the activities that we repeatedly do in the same manner, day after day. Our character is a composite of our habits. If you want to become successful, you need to adopt these seven habits.

The author says that whatever your present situation is, you are not your habits. You can replace old destructive habits with new habits of effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationship. There are many honest people in this world like you who are willing to change the destructive habits. You just need to examine and find out your bad habits to replace them with these seven habits.

The seven habits described in this book are based on natural laws and if you adopt them, they will surely bring the maximum long-term beneficial results for you.

People perceive the world differently. We all have our own paradigm and we see things according to our paradigms. Look at the picture on the right side, some people would say that it is a picture of an old lady while others see a beautiful lady in this picture.

If you want to change your life, you must first change the way you look at the things, you should focus on improving your personal attitude and behavior.

To download more books – visit www.readtowake.com – the home of best-selling book summaries

After describing the importance of attitude and behavior, the author reveals the seven most effective habits that are following:

1. Be Proactive 2. Begin with the End in Mind 3. Put First Thing First 4. Think Win-Win 5. Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood 6. Synergize 7. Sharpen your Saw

1. Be Proactive

The most important things that the humans have is their ability to think. Animals do not have this ability. Only humans have the freedom to choose their thoughts. You can control your mind. You have the ability to control your moods, feelings and thoughts and by doing this you can change your circumstances and conditions.

Proactive means taking initiatives. You need to become proactive, you need to take full responsibility of your life. You have ability to take actions and make things happen.

There are two kinds of problems or obstacles we face in our life. First type are the problems you can do something to reduce them, while other problems just occur in your life, you don’t have any control on them.

To download more books – visit www.readtowake.com – the home of best-selling book summaries

The author suggests to focus your time on what you can control instead of spending your time focusing on events that you can not control. Take some actions to reduce your problems.

2. Begin With The End In Mind

In this chapter, you need to imagine, what the other people are saying and thinking about you if you are dead and they have come on your funeral?

What character would you like them to have seen in you? What achievements and contributions would you want them to remember? The things you want them to say about you, are your core values so from now you should work on those values.

You should develop a personal mission statement that focuses on what you want to be and do in your life.

3. Put First Thing First

Put First thing First is the most powerful and effective habit, the author has written a whole book on this habit. This is the habit of time and life management.

All the things you do daily can be divided in two categories they are either urgent and important or not urgent and not important. You should ask yourself this question “What one thing could you do that if you do on regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?”

To download more books – visit www.readtowake.com – the home of best-selling book summaries

You should remind yourself the Pareto principle that states that 80% of the results flow out of 20% of the activities. You need to focus on those most important 20% activities that generate 80% result. You should not spend time doing unimportant tasks. Set priorities to become more productive.

4. Think Win-Win

Think Win-Win habit teaches you to work together to seek mutual benefits. This habit encourages you to see other people as cooperative rather than competitor.

It is based on the theory that there is plenty in this world for everybody and one person’s success should not be achieved at the expense of the success of others.

Normally people think that if I win you lose. Most people have been deeply scripted in the win-lose mentality since birth. We are being programmed that this world is a zero sum game where some people win while other lose.

To become more effective you should work with other people to get leverage of the abilities and strengths of other people. This habit is essential to become successful.

5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Covey explains that Communication is the most important skill in life. There are four basic types of communication – reading, writing, speaking and listening.

To download more books – visit www.readtowake.com – the home of best-selling book summaries

The most important factor in good communication is listening carefully what the other person is saying. Unfortunately people spend most of their time to improve their speaking, writing and reading skills. They don’t try to improve their listening skills. They don’t listen what other person is saying instead they are thinking in their mind what they are going to say next.

The author says that if you want to become effective, you first need to listen and understand what the other person is saying.

A good salesperson first understands the needs of others, a good doctor first understands the problems of the patient, a good lawyer first gathers all the facts to understand the situation.

6. Synergize

Synergy can be defined as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example if you plant two plants together, they will grow better than if they were separated, two pieces of wood together will hold more weight together than they will hold separately.

According to this principle one plus one equals three or more. The way one man and one women bring a child into this world is synergistic. To be effective we must value the physical differences between people to create new opportunities for each other.

Synergy is almost as if a group of people collectively wish to work together to create some productive things. Synergy is making improvements and creating something new with the cooperation of others.

To download more books – visit www.readtowake.com – the home of best-selling book summaries

7. Sharpen the Saw

The habit number seven encourages you to take some time off to sharpen the saw (improve your skills). The greatest asset you have is –You. Your personal productivity will decrease without proper care.

The author recommends that you need to invest some time and money on yourself, to improve your skills. This is the best investment you can ever make.

The author says to follow below written steps to sharpen your saw:

• Physical– Health exercise.

• Spiritual – Meditation and Religious lectures.

• Mental – formal education, seminars, books and autobiographies.

• Social/Emotional– leadership, communication and cooperation.

Final Thoughts on This Book

This is just a brief summary of this amazing book, the full book is very fascinating and comprehensive. It has solid advice that can improve your life. Everyone who wants to become more productive and effective should read this book.

No personal development book’s list can be complete without including this book. I highly recommend this book to you, buy it, read it. Be proactive. This is a super success book.

---

The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

First and Foremost

The framework for most of this book is structured under the acronym “DEAL”:

Definition: Replace self-defeating assumptions.

Elimination: Forget time management; learn to ignore the unimportant. (provides time) Automation: Learn to put cash flow on autopilot. (provides income)

Liberation: Create freedom of location. (provides mobility)

Tim wraps up the intro by giving a pretty detailed chronology of his life, which I respect tremendously for its boldness. Almost without exception, people who succeed leave out the details of how they got there, leaving you to wonder if their methods just got them in trouble until they just got lucky, or if they really have a repeatable formula. People like to create a narrative of consistent upward progress because that is the version of reality that the world expects. True to the stated principle of the book, Tim shares the up-and-down journey and “lucky” breaks.

Step I: D is for Definition

Chapter 1: Cautions and Comparisons: How to Burn $1,000,000 a Night

Tim begins expounding on his “New Rich” classification by specifying precisely what it is not – spending your life working to buy things you don’t need, like the guy who is rich enough to drop $1,000,000 in a night at Vegas, but never liked a single one of the businesses he started.

The author then provides a number of additional examples of the contrast.

Here are a few:

Deferrer: To work when you want to.

New Rich: To have others work for you.

Deferrer: To retire early and young.

New Rich: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.

Deferrer: To reach the big pay-off, whether IPO, acquisition, retirement, or other pot of gold.

New Rich: To think big but ensure payday comes every day: cash flow first, big payday second.

Tim sees being financially rich and being able to live like a millionaire as two profoundly different things. Why? Money is multiplied in practical (or “lifestyle”) value if you can control what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. What we want isn’t money; it’s the power to do what we want with our lives.

Chapter 2: Rules that Change the Rules: Everything Popular Is Wrong

If everyone is defining a problem or trying to solve it the same way and the results aren’t satisfactory, ask, “What if I did the opposite?” As an example, the author talks about how in his first sales job, he discovered that the primary barrier to setting up a meeting with potential clients was the gatekeepers (secretaries, etc.).

He started making all his calls only from 8:00 – 8:30 and 6:00 – 6:30, which netted him twice the number of meetings than the people who made calls all day long from 9 – 5. In this chapter, Tim presents ten ways that you need to redefine and solve life in order to leverage this principle. 1.Retirement is worst-case scenario insurance. The whole concept of retirement is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you’re doing during the most physically capable years of your life, which is a terrible and completely unacceptable reality. To be honest, building up enough capital to sustain a retirement above the poverty level is a mathematical impossibility for most people, given the realities of today’s market. Only incredibly ambitious and hard-working individuals could ever reach such a goal, and if you’re that type, are you really going to want to sit around and do nothing? You’ll probably want to get another job – so why did you wait all those years?

2. Interest and energy are cyclical. The key to thriving is alternating periods of work and rest, and that principle holds true at the career level. By distributing “mini-retirements” throughout life, you not only have a more enjoyable life, but you are also more productive when you work.

3. Less is not laziness. Our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice over personal effectiveness, but the New Rich measure their contribution in results, not time. Laziness isn’t working less; laziness is letting circumstances define your life for you, or “passing through life like a spectator from an office window.”

4. The timing is never right. Forget the pro/con list; whatever it is that you want to do someday, just do it now.

5. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. People will deny things on an emotional basis that they’ll actually accept after you’ve already done it. As long as any potential damage is minimal or reversible, don’t give anyone the chance to say no; just do it, and you can ask for forgiveness later if necessary.

6. Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. Enhancing your strengths often provides a multiplier effect, while trying to fix weaknesses typically leads to only incremental improvement. 7. Things in excess become their opposite. This is true of time as well as possessions. The point of this book is not to create excess idle time, but to allow you to use your time to do what you want to do rather than what you are obligated to do.

8. Money alone is not the solution. Adding more money isn’t the answer as often as we think it is. We delude ourselves into thinking that we need more, and busy ourselves trying to make more, thereby avoiding the real problem.

9. Relative income is more important than absolute income. Relative income is a measure of both time and money; for example, the person working 10 hours a week and making $10,000 is richer than the person working 80 hours a week and making $100,000.

10. Distress is bad, eustress is good. Eustress is stress that helps you grow. Embrace good stress instead of avoiding stress altogether.

Chapter 3: Dodging Bullets: Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

Cut through the ambiguous anxiety about doing what you want to do by naming your worst nightmare, literally and specifically: what’s the worst that could happen? Then think of simple steps you could take to recover if it did happen.

Define the worst case scenario on a scale of 1 – 10, then do the same for the potential benefit. You might find that you’re avoiding taking action that could have a permanent positive effect of 9 because of a possible temporary effect of 3.

Now compare that to the risk of being stuck in an office for the next 40 years. What is it really costing you to postpone action?

Chapter 4: System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous

Because most people are convinced they can only accomplish mediocre things, the competition for mediocre goals is actually more intense than the competition for incredible things. Perhaps this is also partly due to motivation – we will try much harder for a dream worth dreaming. Rather than asking yourself, “What do I want,” or “What are my goals,” try, “What excites me?” You have to define that alternate reality to replace what you’re doing now. Otherwise, you’re stuck with the vague, “I’ll make X dollars and then I can do what I want.” Define what you want!

The author introduces the term “dreamlining”: applying a timeline to your dreams to make the shift from ambiguous wants to defined steps. (This is the same technique championed by Tony Robbins in Section 3 of Money: Master the Game.)

The goal has to be unrealistic to be effective, and it has to focus on activities to replace the work you’re doing now.

1. Create a 6-month and 12-month timeline, and for each one write down five things you dream of having, five things you dream of being, and five things you dream of doing. Then convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it more defined. If you need a more defined framework, write down one place to visit, one memory of a lifetime, one thing you’d love to do every day, one thing you’d love to do every week, and one thing you’ve always wanted to learn.

2. Out of all 15 for each timeline, circle the four that would change it all.

3. Research and calculate the monthly cost of each of those four. Think in terms of monthly cash flow, not total cost. (a $260k Lamborghini can be leased for less than $3k/month.)

4. Add up all the expenses, multiply by 1.3 (cushion for savings), then divide by 30 to get your target daily income.

5. Write down three first steps for each of the four dreams in your six-month timeline and take the first step now. (“Now” as in “leave this webpage immediately, go do those four things, then come back.”) Do the second four steps by 11:00 a.m. tomorrow, and the last four by 11:00 a.m. the day after. The steps should be doable enough that you can make this happen.

（http://www.deconstructingexcellence.com/money-master-the-game-summary/）

Step II: E is for Elimination

Chapter 5: The End of Time Management: Illusions and Italians

After defining what you want to do with your time, you have to free that time (without taking an income penalty). The approach to time management that most people take is the wrong one: trying to fill every moment with productivity. Because the expectation in an office environment is constant motion, not productivity, you must remove yourself from that environment.

As an employee you’ll need to liberate yourself with a remote working arrangement before you can automate. If you’re an entrepreneur, the roadblock is your business, not your employer, so you’ll be going in the reverse order – automating in order to liberate yourself.

Tim then introduces the Paretto principle, famously observed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto: in any field of endeavor, 80% of results come from 20% of actions.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?

2. What 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

You’ll have to spend some time to think about these questions, but if you think you can’t answer them clearly, you haven’t thought about them enough. There are no exceptions to the Paretto principle.

Tim’s example comes from when he realized that five of his customers were bringing in 95% of his revenue. Two of those five were horrible, and the three others never caused any problems. So, Tim stopped putting any effort into the 120 other customers, and confronted the two problem customers. One left; one shaped up. Tim then focused all his effort on finding customers like the top three, and in a month doubled his income and cut his hours from 80 to 15. If you’re going to join the New Rich, you need to make the fundamental mentality shift that “being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action... lack of time is actually lack of priorities.” The other half of time management is known as Parkinson’s Law: “A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.” These two laws are synergistic: only do the 20% to shorten time, and shorten time so you focus on the 20%.

Chapter 6: The Low-Information Diet: Cultivating Selective Ignorance

Never read the news. If it’s actually important, people will be talking about it and you’ll find out. Tim does email once a week for an hour, which might not be possible for those of us stuck in the 9 – 5. But the point is that if you remove yourself as the bottleneck, the problems disappear. As a mental reset, he also recommends taking five days to completely eliminate television (except for one hour of pleasure viewing), reading books (except for one hour of fiction), and web surfing (unless necessary for work). To wrap up the chapter, Tim gives some other tips and tricks, the most important of which is practicing the art of non-finishing. Most of us are in the habit of automatically finishing whatever we start, but if you feel an article, movie, meal, or anything else is wasting your time, stop. It will take practice to break this ingrained and wasteful habit.

Chapter 7: Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

Tim tells the story of how in college whenever he didn’t get an “A” on a paper or non-multiple choice test, he would go to the grader’s office with 2 – 3 hours of questions. With this method he learned exactly how the professor’s mind worked, but more importantly, the professor would never again give him anything less than an “A” unless there was a very good reason – otherwise they knew they would face another 2 – 3 hour visit.

The lesson is to be difficult when it counts – develop the reputation of being assertive so you fight your fight once, up front, instead of many times later. In the context of this book, Tim identifies three main categories:

1. Time wasters: unimportant email, phone calls, meetings, etc. Turn off the notification on your email as well as the auto send/receive, and check email only twice per day, at noon and 4:00. Tim recommends you set an autoresponder letting people know that due to high workload you are checking email only at those times. Include a number people can call if they have an urgent need. Remember – ask for forgiveness, not permission. You could speak to your boss beforehand and propose you try the approach for a few days, citing constant interruptions and a pending deadline. Then move to checking email only once a day as soon as possible. Do the same for your phone communication – put your office phone on silent and always let it go to voicemail. In your voicemail recording, give callers that second number they can call if they have an urgent need. When someone does call the urgent number, get to the point of the call immediately. For example: You: “Hi, this is John.” Caller: “Hi John, this is Jane.” You: “Hi Jane, I’m right in the middle of something/I have a call in just a minute/I’m about to go to a meeting. How can I help?” The last step is to eliminate meetings.

Tim gives a few tips for doing so: Your communication preference should be first email, then phone, then meetings. Try to always steer people up the chain (e.g., from meeting to email by asking the person who has requested the meeting to send you an agenda first). Respond to voicemail with email whenever possible. Propose “if-then” solutions that take you out of the problem-solving process. Meetings should never be held to define a problem, only to make decisions about a problem that is already defined. Use the agenda trick, and you’ll find you can often avoid the meeting by answering the question via email. If meetings are necessary, define the end time in advance. You can site an important commitment you have soon after the meeting. Use the phone efficiency technique when people drop by your work station – let the intruder know you’re in the middle of something, but also insist that they go ahead and tell you what they want so you get the quick summary instead of having them bother you again later. Use the “Puppy Dog Close” to manage up and across to eliminate wasteful meetings. When the pet store salesman says, “Just take the puppy home and try him out, and you can bring him back tomorrow if you want,” it’s much more likely the sale will be made, and highly unlikely the puppy will be brought back. Try, “I’d really like to go to the meeting, but am swamped today. Can I sit out just for today and catch up with X afterward?”

2. Time consumers: things that must be done but often interrupt high-level work – customer service, financial reporting, personal errands, etc. The best practice for time consumers is simple: batching. By stretching the time periods between doing these kinds of tasks then doing them all at once, you eliminate setup and switching time, among other efficiencies.

3. Empowerment failures: when someone needs approval to make something insignificant happen. To avoid these, establish a clear (ideally quantitative) threshold up to which your delegates have authority to make decisions on your behalf. Adjust the threshold based on results. This works the other way as well – if you’re being micromanaged, put together some rules that would give you freedom to spend less time getting approval from your boss. Tell your boss something like, “I know you’re busy, and I hate to always be interrupting you. I’ve been doing some reading and have some ideas about how I can be more productive. Can we try out these guidelines for a day/week?” A good way to sum up this chapter is to always let your default response for any request be, “No.”

Step III: A is for Automation

Chapter 8: Outsourcing Life: Off-loading the Rest and a Taste of Geo-arbitrage

A key part of becoming a member of the New Rich is to build systems to replace yourself, and an easy way to begin doing so is to hire a virtual assistant (VA) – someone in a low-cost geographic location who can save you time doing menial tasks. Tim mentions Brickwork and Your Man in India. Both are still in operation in 2015, but Your Man in India seems to have shifted its focus away from VAs. You’ll have to submit a request on Brickwork’s website for their current rates, but as of 2015 it will cost you $11 -$15 an hour for a VA to take care of personal errands, scheduling appointments, etc. (VAs with specific skills like business research or SEO may cost up to $22.) eLance.com is also mentioned later, and services like Fiverr have also become available since Tim wrote the book. However, going with a VA company rather than a single VA gives you a backup in case one person becomes unavailable. Try out a few VAs, and see which one you like the most. First try to eliminate, and then try to automate. Only delegate what remains; otherwise you’ll be wasting your time and money. Additionally, make sure each task is both time-consuming and well-defined – otherwise, delegation might not be the most effective option. The biggest objection people have is the expense, but Tim’s reply to that concern is to consider what an hour of your time is worth. If you could pay $40 each week to have Friday off, wouldn’t you do it? Paying $40 for a VA that saves you eight hours of work throughout each week is essentially the same thing. The second objection is security, and the author goes into detail about how your personal information is much more secure with these VA firms than it is on your own computer. Use common sense, and you’ll be fine. Here are a few more useful tips:

1) Request someone who has excellent English and make it clear that phone calls will be required.

2) Don’t just accept the first person the firm provides. Shop around to get a great VA.

3) Give instructions at the 2nd grade reading level. If you can’t do that, you’re probably not being sufficiently precise. Calibrate as necessary once you’ve assessed the VA’s abilities.

4) Request that a status update be provided after the first couple hours to ensure that things are on track.

5) Set the deadline at less than 72 hours.

6) Always clarify the relative priority of tasks or portions of tasks.

Chapter 9: Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse

Now that you’ve made some room in your schedule, it’s time to find your muse, which the author defines as a product-based business that costs less than $500 to test and after a month’s time will require less than one day per week to manage.

Step 1: Pick an affordably reachable niche market. Find a market first by defining your customers, and then design your product around them. It becomes much easier if you’re a member of that target market yourself.

Step 2: Brainstorm (do not invest in) products. Here are your brainstorming constraints: The benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase. Your product should sell for between $50 – $200, which is the sweet spot to be able to sell fewer units, create higher profit margins, and attract lower-maintenance customers – but not so expensive that customers want to speak with you before buying. Your product should also take less than four weeks to manufacture in order to keep costs low and easily adapt to demand. One to two weeks is ideal. Your product should be fully explainable in an online FAQ.

This isn’t a formula for a good business; rather, it is a set of constraints suitable to the specific type of lifestyle business that qualifies as a muse. Tim recommends you create your own product, rather than reselling or licensing, and the easiest type of product to create is an information product – low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate. If you read the top three books on a given subject, you’ll know more about the subject than 80% of the relevant population, thereby qualifying you as an expert. Simply take a general subject and summarize it in a way that is specific to the needs of your niche market. For example, if you’re a real estate broker and realize that you’d like a simple but good-looking website to promote your services, read the three top selling books on home page design, and create a CD, ebook, guide, etc. to communicate the key points as they relate to a real estate broker. Bonus tip: To crank up the expert factor, consider finding experts to interview and sell the accumulation of their advice. The person with the highest credibility will sell the most, not the person who knows the most about the subject. Fortunately, it’s very easy to establish credibility. In less than a month, your bio could read like this: “Top relationship expert who, as featured in Glamour and other national media, has counseled executives at Fortune 500 companies on how to improve their relationships in 24 hours or less.” Here’s how:

1) Join two or three related trade associations with official-sounding names.

2) Read the three top-selling books on the topic and write a one-page summary of each.

3) Go to the closest well-known university, put up posters advertising a free seminar on the subject, and give the seminar using the summaries you’ve written.

4) Call up a local branch of a well-known company and tell them you’ve done the seminars at the university and that you’re a member of the trade associations. Explain that you’re trying to gain speaking experience outside of the academic setting.

5) Leverage your trade association membership and speaking experience to get an article published for a trade magazine. One option is to interview a known expert for the article. 6) Join ProfNet or ExpertClick, services journalists use to find expert quotes for their articles. Use the credibility you’ve gained from the previous steps, and it’s actually pretty easy to be quoted in well-known media.

Chapter 10: Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse

Experience and intuition are both poor predictors of the success of a product; the only way to test if anyone actually wants your product is to ask people to buy. The easiest way to do so is to create a basic one-to-three-page website, put up a Google AdWords advertisement for five days, and use the response to test whether people will buy. Here’s the process:

1) Google the top terms people would use to find your product. Sign into your Google AdWords account, then use the Keyword Sandbox to figure out which keywords people use.

2) Visit the top three websites that consistently appear. Ask yourself how you could differentiate your product.

3) If people are searching and you have a way to differentiate, create a one-page testimonial-rich ad that emphasizes the benefits and differentiators of the product. Model your ad after other ads that have induced you to personally buy something, and get friends to try out the product for testimonials.

4) Test pricing by putting up a 48-hour eBay auction for the product, then cancelling before the auction expires (since you don’t yet have product to ship). Then set up a website – you’ll need to purchase a domain name and hosting from a company like BlueHost and create the page with your ad using Dreamweaver or other software (many people use WordPress). Include a “purchase” button that takes visitors to a second page with pricing, shipping, handling, and basic contact info (email, phone, etc.). Then have another button that says “Continue with order,” but goes to a page that says something like, “Unfortunately, we are on back order but will contact you as soon as we have product in stock. Thank you for your patience.” Track how many people visit that last page; each one counts as an order.

5) Set up five-day Google Adwords campaigns with 50 – 100 search terms to drive traffic and test click- through rates for different ad headlines. Aim for specific search terms so you get higher conversion rates and lower ad costs per click, and cap your cost at $50 per day. When you sign up for an Adwords account, you’ll get free tools to track “orders” and bounce rates. Tim suggests AWeber to track email signups, although I personally use MailChimp’s WordPress plugin.

6) Compare your product costs to your product price and best click-through and purchase rates. If the math works, set up a Yahoo store and PayPal account to receive payments. If the math doesn’t work, tweak your ads and landing page until it does, or move on to the next idea.

Chapter 11: MBA – Management by Absence

Once you have a profitable formula, the challenge is to remove yourself from the equation. Here are the two primary guidelines:

1) Learn how to do something yourself, then contract outsourcing companies that specialize in that function, not freelancers. This gives you a redundancy plan so you’re not depending on one person. 2) Make sure all outsourcers are able to communicate among themselves, and give them written authority to make inexpensive decisions on your behalf.

Tim recommends you implement outsourcing in three phases:

Phase I: 0 – 50 units of product sold. Start by doing everything yourself so you can learn from customers about what they want, what their concerns are, and what isn’t sufficiently clear on your website.

Phase II: >10 units sold per week. Find a fulfillment company (just Google “fulfillment services”) who will agree not to charge you setup fees or monthly minimums (usually the smaller firms), and who will respond to inquiries from customers. Give them the list of responses you’ve collected from dealing with customer service yourself. After paying promptly for a month, ask for net 30 payment terms.

Phase III: >20 units sold per week. Decide upon an end-to-end fulfillment company, and ask for references to call centers and credit card processors they’ve worked with. Set up an account with the credit card processor first, then engage the new fulfillment company (necessary so the fulfillment house can also handle refunds and declined cards for you). If you need a call center, call the actual number of each one a few different times to test the wait times and personnel quality. An important part of setting up your “muse” correctly to reduce service overhead is what Tim refers to as the art of “undecision.”

1) Offer only one or two product options.

2) Offer only one shipping option, as long as it’s not overnight or expedited. Otherwise, you’re inviting anxious phone calls.

3) Only take orders online, never by phone.

4) Don’t offer international shipping. If you’re worried you’ll lose customers by doing these things, you’re right – that’s the point. Avoid dealing with problem customers (i.e., time consumers) by preventing them from ordering in the first place.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

Chapter 12

Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office Tim offers a five-step process to convince your employer to let you do your job out of the office:

Step 1: Increase investment. Get your employer to first invest in you to increase their cost if you leave. For example, ask if the firm has any additional trainings available to employees and take them.

Step 2: Prove increased output offsite. Call off sick for two days in the middle of the week, double your work output on both days, and make sure to demonstrate and record it with an email trail or otherwise. If you have to be on your computer at work, try GoToMyPC remote access software. Step 3: Prepare the quantifiable business benefit. You need to position remote working as a business benefit, not a personal perk. Bill more client time, complete more projects, or otherwise demonstrate quantified improvement. Explain the increased productivity as less time commuting and fewer distractions.

Step 4: Propose a revocable trial period. Informally mention to your boss how you were sick those two days and didn’t expect to get anything done, but were actually twice as productive. Ask if you could try working from home Monday and Tuesday for the next two weeks as a trial that your boss can veto at any time. Make sure to mention that you’ll of course come to the office for any meetings or anything else that comes up. “So what do you think? Test it out starting next Monday and see how much more I get done?” When your boss objects, acknowledge his concerns and propose working from home only one day a week instead.

Step 5: Expand remote time. Continue to kill it on your work-from-home days and slightly drop your in-office performance to heighten the contrast. Ask for another trial period with an extra two days at home, dropping down to one extra day if necessary. After your boss has gotten used to this, ask for a full-time remote trial of two weeks as you visit relatives out of state or some other understandable reason to need to be away. (Bonus tip: schedule vacation for a time that you know will be busy at work, then once the time comes and people are panicking, be the hero by offering to work the whole time remotely instead.)

Chapter 13: Beyond Repair: Killing Your Job

If you can’t get to a satisfactory level of remote working at your job – just quit (as long as you’re more likely to find what you want somewhere else other than your current job). Tim counters the four usual objections to doing so:

Objection #1: Quitting is permanent. Go back to the exercise in Chapter 3, and you’ll quickly discover that it’s entirely possible to get right back on the same track if you change your mind. Objection #2: I won’t be able to pay the bills. First of all, don’t quit without having another job lined up if you don’t have another source of cash. Secondly, there are always options to lower expenses. Go through all your monthly expenses and ask yourself, “If I had to eliminate this because I needed an extra kidney, how would I do it?”

Objection #3: Health insurance and retirement accounts disappear if I quit. The health insurance situation in the U.S. is different now from when Tim wrote this book, but you can still probably get insurance for about the same price. In addition to the government’s insurance exchanges, there are plenty of private insurance exchanges. You might even qualify for some discounts through a professional association or other group. As for retirement, it’s easy to transfer your 401(k). Objection #4: It will ruin my resume. If you’re quitting your job in the spirit of this book, you’re doing it in order to do something interesting. The period after you quit is going to be the most interesting item on your resume (if you ever need one again), and the one thing that will make you stand out the most and land interviews.

Chapter 14: Mini-retirements: Embracing the Mobile Lifestyle

In this chapter, Tim attacks what he calls “one of the biggest self-deceptions of the modern age: extended world travel as the domain of the ultrarich.” People work their whole lives, hoping to save enough money to retire to a tropical beach house. The really ambitious seek out high-stress, high-paying careers in law, finance, etc., telling themselves they’ll work nonstop for 15, 20, 25 years in order to save up a couple million to finance their early retirement of proverbial motorcycle rides across China.

Tim has spent less than $3,000 each for three common “deferred dreams”: living large in Thailand, sailing across the Caribbean, and even riding that motorcycle across China. He’s also paid $250 for five days on a private tropical island with three local fisherman who caught and cooked all his food and took him to all the best hidden diving spots in Panama, and $150 for a three-day private plane charter over the beautiful Mendoza vineyards and snow-capped Andes mountains of Argentina. You can easily blow that kind of money in a weekend or two of “nonsense and throwaway forget-the-week behavior” in most U.S. cities.

Tim actually suggests much more than one-to-three-week life-changing trips to exotic locales; he wants us to take the usual 20 to 30 years of retirement and spread it throughout our lives in one- to six-month increments. The intention isn’t a vacation to escape from your life, but a lifestyle of recurring mini-retirements where you experience the world, as opposed to just seeing it.

This alternate reality may seem strange to you, but it’s not just best-selling authors and geniuses who can pull it off; Tim has met paraplegics, senior citizens, single mothers, and people from every walk of life who have done the same. A luxury penthouse in Buenos Aires with maids and personal security guards will cost you less ($550, including utilities) than you will pay for a run-down apartment in the bad part of town in the U.S. At $5 for a five-star restaurant in the same city, you can also eat like a king.

If you use a credit card with good travel points for all muse- related purchases, you’ll often get there and back for free. Here are a few resources Tim recommends for making your mini-retirement happen:

General information

• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

• Round-the-world FAQ from Marc Brosius

• One Bag: The Art and Science of Packing Light

Inexpensive Flights

• Orbitz and Kayak

• TravelZoo

• Priceline (Use the “name your own price” feature to bid half the lowest Orbitz fare, then go up in increments of $50)

• CFares

• 1800FlyEurope

Free or Inexpensive Lodging

• Global Freeloaders

• Couchsurfing

• Hospality Club

• Home Exchange

• Hostels.com

• Craigslist

Chapter 15: Filling the Void: Adding Life After Subtracting Work

The person who has learned to replace self-defeating assumptions, eliminate the unimportant, put cash flow on autopilot, and create freedom of location will soon find themselves with an existential crisis. When you no longer have the external focus and daily distraction of meaningless work, your mind begins to turn inward and you start to torture yourself with questions like, “What is the meaning of it all?” I’m going to assume that most of us aren’t going to face that problem for a while, so I’ll skip the author’s ruminations on the deeper mysteries of life. One conclusion, however, is worth mentioning: the point is not simply to reduce your work week to four hours, but to replace that meaningless activity with something more fulfilling.

Chapter 16: The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

In your journey toward becoming a member of the New Rich, watch out for the 13 most common pitfalls:

Mistake #1: Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake.

Mistake #2: Micromanaging and e-mailing to fill time.

Mistake #3: Handling problems your outsourcers or co-workers can handle.

Mistake#4: Helping outsourcers or co-workers with the same problem more than once, or with non-crisis problems.

Mistake #5: Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your non-financial pursuits.

Mistake #6: Answering e-mail that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder.

Mistake #7: Working where you live, sleep, or should relax.

Mistake #8: Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life.

Mistake #9: Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life.

Mistake #10: Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work.

Mistake #11: Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work.

Mistake #12: Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence. Mistake #13: Ignoring the social rewards of life.

Conclusion

As you might have guessed, I’m a colossal Tim Ferriss fan. Beyond the scope of The 4 Hour Workweek and into his blog, podcast, and other books (The 4 Hour Body and The 4 Hour Chef), he is constantly pushing the boundaries of human performance, and is one of the best in the world at “meta-learning” – learning how to learn.

Others have championed the same ideas that Tim outlined in this book, but none have done it so effectively. If you dread the idea of the deferred-life plan, I can’t recommend a better teacher to get you out.

The first time I read the book, there were certain things that I considered simply impossible given my personal situation. I made the mistake of discarding those tips entirely. Don’t make the same mistake; understand each principle and implement to the fullest extent you can.

You might need to calibrate certain principles, such as the art of refusal, based on your environment. You’ll probably also want to evaluate the advisability of each section based on your own personal costs and resources (e.g., make the more efficient investment of getting a dishwasher and paying someone to mow your lawn before you start buying time via virtual assistant.)

If you want to hear more from Tim Ferriss, you can find his blog here and his podcast here. He also recently release a TV series that has been ranking #1 across all of iTunes. The show is higher on entertainment value than usefulness, but it’s also a great way to get introduced to the work Tim does.

---

How to Win Friends and Influence People

--1936 Dale Carnegie

Part One: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People.

1: If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive. It is basic human nature to reject criticism and justify one’s actions. Al Capone said, “I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”

If even the most notorious gangster in U.S. history viewed himself in this light, it’s not likely that the average person is going to take criticism well. Take Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “I will speak ill of no man... and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

2: The Big Secret of Dealing with People. Of the basic human needs, Carnegie asserts, the desire to be important, or to be great, is the need that is most difficult to meet. “If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character.”

If you can deliver that sense of importance to your fellow man, you will have found the key to dealing with people. As Charles Schwab said, “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among the men the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.”

Our natural response is to criticize what we don’t like, and remain silent about what we do. If you find it difficult to appreciate people (or certain people), take Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.”

Every person on earth knows something you don’t; seek to learn that thing in every interaction, and you will make the other person feel important. This is not to suggest the practice of flattery; on the contrary, the author is advocating that you be alert for every opportunity to voice sincere appreciation when anything is done well.

3: He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way. When you go fishing, you don’t bait the hook with the strawberries you’d like to snack on; you use what the fish prefer, worms. Yet in our interactions with people, we always barge in talking about what we want, which is a complete waste of time and effort. Instead, we should always be asking ourselves what the other person wants, and present our reasoning from their perspective. Tell them how it will get them what they want.

Henry Ford said, “If there is any one secret to success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” (More recently, there have been a number of great books devoted to the importance of understanding incentives, such as Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics.)

It may sound obvious, but most people nevertheless persist in approaching each interaction with the desire to explain their own needs and desires. “So,” as the author puts it, “The rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.”

Part Two: Six Ways to Make People Like You

1: Do This and You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere. The first way to make people like you is quite simple: be interested in them. One easy application the author suggests is to record and remember people’s birthdays. (In today’s age of digital reminders, it might be more meaningful to wish people a happy birthday a day or two in advance, if it’s acceptable in your culture.)

People like to be remembered, admired, and sought after for help – so if you need something from someone, tell them that they are the only person who can help you, ask for exactly what you need from them, and make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

The author tells several stories about people who genuinely took an interest in the other person, even though that interest wasn’t remotely related to what they needed from them. You will often find that if you simply take an interest in the other person, they will often give you what you need, and frequently more, without you even asking.

Call it karma, or reaping what you sow, but the fundamental truth is that you will accomplish much more by taking an interest in people, and giving them what they want, then you will by all the best sales techniques in the world.

2: A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression. “Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, as the author bluntly puts it, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.’” An insincere smile won’t do you any good, so preface your smile by being thankful for what you have.

Happiness is a result of our inward condition, not our outward circumstance, and we have the ability to control our thoughts. William James put it this way: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” (See Habit 1 in my summary of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for Victor Frankl’s comment on the subject.)

3: If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble. Jim Farley was raised by a single mother around the turn of

the 19th century, starting work as a bricklayer when he was 10 years old and never getting much education. He ended up as the Postmaster General of the United States, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the man responsible for putting F.D.R. into the White House.

Farley’s secret was that he could call 50,000 people by their first name. Each time he met someone, he would ask about the person’s name, family size, profession, and political leanings, and created a mental picture of these things. (Travis Bradberry recommends a similar technique in Chapter 7 of Emotional Intelligence 2.0.) Use and remember a person’s name, and you have instant likeability.

4: An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist. To put it simply, quickly find what interests the other person, encourage them to talk about themselves, and shut up. People are usually far more interested in what they are already interested in than they are in listening to you.

Most people approach a conversation by trying to find a commonality, but if you focus instead on the other person’s greatest interest and simply pay active and close attention while they discuss it, they will find you to be a great conversationalist. You don’t need to even say much at all.

It is remarkably easy to defuse an angry conversation; again, just shut up. All you have to do is listen to the other person until they have told their whole story and are satisfied that they have expressed themselves. By that time, you should be able to address the problem from their viewpoint, which often results in a change of subject and a quick resolution to the actual problem at hand.

5: How to Interest People. When Teddy Roosevelt had it on his schedule to meet someone the next day, he would stay up late to read on a subject in which the person was interested. Spend your energy to find the other person’s passion, not to prepare your own elevator speech, and begin the conversation with that subject instead of charging headlong into what you need out of the meeting. Those from Western cultures especially make this mistake, fooling themselves into thinking they are results-oriented, or efficient, or some other nonsense. You will be much more effective with this approach.

6: How to Make People Like You Instantly. Whenever you meet someone, however briefly in passing, ask yourself, “What is there about him that I can honestly admire?” Everyone wants approval, recognition, and a feeling of importance, and it doesn’t take much for you to deliver all of those things.

Practice doing this with everyone you meet – clerks at the post office as well as your business associates. Make it a habit, and together with the other practices listed above, it will greatly improve your results and relationships.

Part Three: Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1: You Can’t Win an Argument. Even if you shoot down your opponent with your incredible wit and knowledge, he will still leave the conversation feeling resentment – so you lose either way. It’s simply not worth the time to argue. Abraham Lincoln said, “No man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare the time for personal contention.”

The author again sees things through the lens of making people feel important – if you argue with someone, they may be getting their feeling of importance by exercising their authority to block you. If you acknowledge their importance instead, their ego has room to breathe, and you may then find they become sympathetic to your cause.

2:ASureWayofMakingEnemies–andHowtoAvoidIt. Inasimilarvein,youshouldneverwasteyourtime trying to prove someone wrong. First of all, have some humility – we are all influenced by our own cognitive biases, and even the most fervent student of psychology falls prey to the shortcomings of the human mind on a daily basis. (If you want to gain a greater appreciation for how little we know and how irrational and terrible our decision-making is, see The Farnam Street Latticework of Mental Models for links to a number of great articles on cognitive biases.)

Mr. Carnegie suggests this script when you believe another person is in error: “Well, now, look! I thought otherwise, but I may be wrong. I frequently am. And if I am wrong, I want to be put right. Let’s examine the facts.”

The author also recommends The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , which remains a popular and often- recommended volume today. Franklin is known by history for his incredibly adroit dealings with other people, and his biography is filled with gems like this (emphasis added):

“I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself the use of every word... that imported a fix’d opinion, such as “certainly,” “undoubtedly,” etc... I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d... some difference... And to this habit... I think it principally owing that I had early so much weight with my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions...”

3: If You’re Wrong, Admit It. And do it “quickly, openly, and with enthusiasm.” Yet again, the author ties in the concept of people’s need for importance. When you condemn yourself, the only option for the other party to nourish their own self-esteem is to defend you. Even when the other party’s interests are clearly contrary to your own, it is a powerful weapon to admit your faults. (If you want to see just how powerful, refer to James Altucher’s article How to Get an MBA from Eminem.)

A newspaper reader once wrote in to criticize one of Elbert Hubbard’s articles. Here is the brilliant response: “Come to think it over, I don’t think I completely agree with it myself. Not everything I wrote yesterday appeals to me today. I am glad to learn what you think on the subject. The next time you are in the neighborhood you must visit us and we’ll get this subject threshed out for all time. So here is a handclasp over the miles, and I am, Yours Sincerely...”

4: The High Road to a Man’s Reason. If we respond to anger with anger, we are never going to convince the other party or engage his reason. If we instead respond to anger with friendliness, sympathy, and appreciation, we can turn an angry situation into a productive one. Woodrow Wilson put it this way:

“If you come at me with your fists doubled, I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, ‘Let us sit down and take counsel together, and, if we differ from one another, understand why it is that we differ from one another, just what the points at issue are,’ we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.”

5: The Secret of Socrates. Never begin a conversation by immediately addressing the ways in which your opinion differs from the other person. Instead, begin – and be diligent in continuing – by emphasizing the things on which you agree. Keep reminding all parties involved that while they might differ in terms of preferred method, they are all striving for the same purpose. A skilled influencer of people will be able to identify that common purpose.

The result of this method is that the other party begins to give his assent, in whatever small ways it might be. A person’s “pride of personality” demands that he remain consistent with himself, so whether you begin with him saying “yes” or “no,” the same response will carry on, naturally directed from the outset. A “yes” or “no” is more than a word; it is a response, and if you want to change the answer, you are going to have to change the whole response. This can be an impossible task, so it is best to get things on track before you begin. Get the other person saying, “Yes,” immediately.

6: The Safety Valve in Handling Complaints. Let people talk. When someone has a complaint, let him talk himself out. When you go for an interview, don’t talk about yourself; ask the interviewer about his early years, and get him talking about himself.

La Rochefoucauld said, “If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.” It doesn’t win you any friends to talk of your accomplishments. Let the other person do most of the talking.

7: How to Get Cooperation. There should never be any need for you to claim credit for an idea; let the other party claim the idea as their own, and you will have a much easier time of getting their cooperation. When you need something, don’t talk about what you need. Present the other person with the available information, and ask them to tell you.

As Lao Tsze said, “The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.”

8: A Formula That Will Work Wonders for You. There is always a reason that a person thinks and acts the way he does. Leave behind the mindset of judging a person’s rightness or wrongness, and instead seek out that reason. You will then have the key to their actions and even their personality. The author asks that if you take away nothing else from this book, you begin to make a practice of honestly trying to see other people’s points of view – not opinions, but why those opinions are held. 9: What Everybody Wants. Mr. Carnegie then gives us a magic phrase: “I don’t blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you, I should undoubtedly feel just as you do.” Feel free to update the phrase for the 21st century, but the point is to acknowledge that you truly would have the same perspective as the other person if you had their temperament, environment, and experiences. Among many others, Steven Covey disagrees on this point in Habit 1 of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , as does Charles Duhigg in chapter 9 of The Power of Habit, but Carnegie’s broader point is undoubtedly valid. While we might argue the role of environmental forces vs. personal choice, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the validity of the other person’s emotions and opinions by declaring them reasonable given their circumstances. They probably are.

10:AnAppealThatEverybodyLikes.

J.P.Morgan once asserted that people usually have two reasons for anything they do: one that sounds good, and the real one. Appeal to people’s nobler motives by providing them with that good reason. Speak and act in a way that assumes the best of them.

11: The Movies Do It. The Radio Does It. Why Don’t You Do It? Merely stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth has to be made “vivid, interesting, dramatic.” Demonstration is far more striking and memorable than words, so show people your ideas rather than telling them.

12: When Nothing Else Works, Try This. Charles Schwab once had a mill manager whose workers weren’t meeting their production quotas. The mill manager had tried everything, with no success. Schwab simply asked how many heats the mill’s day shift had made, and wrote the number in chalk on the mill floor. When the night shift came into work they asked what the number meant, then proceeded to make one more than the day shift had managed and write that number on the floor. Not wanting to be shown up, the day shift came back with even more, and so on until that mill was the most productive in the entire plant.

The principle here is not to set people against each other; it is to issue a challenge to excel. The love of the game and the chance to prove self-worth is one of the most powerful motivators – so introduce some competition when you need to inspire others.

Part Four: Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1: If You Must Find Fault, This Is the Way to Begin. Before you point out a fault in another person’s action, begin with honest appreciation for what they have done well or correctly. After doing so, you might even find that the other person points out their own fault and volunteers to correct it.

2: How to Criticize – and Not Be Hated for It. When Wanamaker’s department store president John Wanamaker was on his daily rounds through the flagship store, he noticed a customer waiting at the counter unattended as store staff stood talking and laughing among themselves at the other end of the counter. Wanamaker slipped behind the counter, served the customer himself, and handed the package to the staff to be wrapped as he continued on his way. Without saying a word, he had clearly communicated to the (probably mortified) staff what was expected of them. When you must criticize, try to find a way to do so indirectly.

3: Talk About Your Own Mistakes First. Criticism is much easier to take when the other person first talks about their own faults. When you need to directly criticize, first mention how you made similar mistakes, or have deficiencies in other areas. “Well, I’m awful at A and I couldn’t B to save my life, but one thing I do know is...”

4: No One Likes to Take Orders. By asking questions instead of giving direct orders, you save people’s pride and preserve their feeling of importance. As Charles Duhigg points out in Chapter 5 of The Power of Habit , a person’s effectiveness is greatly diminished when they are taking orders instead of understanding the purpose of an action and choosing to do it.

5: Let the Other Man Save His Face. General Electric once had to replace the head of one of its departments – a genius in electricity who, it turned out, wasn’t cut out to be a department head. Instead of demoting him, General Electric gave him the new title of Consulting Engineer of the General Electric Company. We usually don’t take the time to think about helping others save face, but if we do, it usually doesn’t take much effort.

6: How to Spur Men on to Success. You’ll get much better results by praising people for any slight improvement or small thing done right than by criticizing when they come up short.

7: Give the Dog a Good Name. A truth of human nature is that people will be compelled to live up to whatever reputation you attribute to them. Tell a person that you think or you have heard that they are honest, or industrious, or any other variety of virtue, and they will usually live up to it – even if their previous actions had indicated otherwise.

8: Make the Fault Seem Easy to Correct. The author tells of how he once declined to play a game of bridge with a friend, stating that the game was too complicated for him. His friend replied, “Why, Dale, it is no trick at all. There is nothing to bridge except memory and judgment. You once wrote a chapter on memory. Bridge will be in a cinch for you. It is right up your alley.”

By telling people that some goal is easily within their grasp or some fault can be corrected with only a minor adjustment, you will give them the confidence to reach the goal or correct the fault.

9: Making People Glad to Do What You Want. The key to making people glad to do what you want, yet again, is to make them feel important. Give them recognition as the best person for a job or authority to oversee a matter, and they will embrace the role you have laid out for them.

When Napoleon Bonaparte created the Legion of Honor, he gave out 1,500 crosses to his soldiers, named 18 of his generals “Marshals of France,” and christened the troops “the Grand Army.” When criticized for giving out “toys,” he responded, “Men are ruled by toys.”

Part Five: Letters That Produced Miraculous Results

The next two parts of the book were in the original 1936 edition, but were excluded from the updated 1981 edition. I think the publisher may have missed the point of this chapter, because it might be the most brilliant part of the entire book.

The author writes of a quirk of human nature that can significantly increase your effectiveness in obtaining what you ask. Here are a few phrases from the letters Carnegie uses as examples:

“I wonder if you mind helping me out of a little difficulty?” Instead of stating, “Please do this thing I want you to do,” begin by asking for help.

“Naturally, I must come to you to help me answer...” If it sounds like a generic message you’re sending to multiple people, the request for help won’t be compelling. The other person needs to feel that you genuinely and specifically need their help to solve your problem.

“Thank you for kindness in giving me this information.” Present your request as a need for kindness. It subtly implies that it would be unkind to ignore your request, and appeals to the person’s better nature. There is a part of human nature that is hardwired to help others, so tap into that proclivity by thanking them in advance for their goodwill.

Part Six: Seven Rules for Making Your Home Life Happier

I can understand why the publisher excluded Part Six of the book from the 1981 publication; it is a bit repetitive, and most of it could probably be summed up by saying all of the principles above apply just as much to home life as they do to business. Some of the perspectives and wording could be construed as sexist, though I would say it could be far worse for a book published in 1936.

Regardless, the author does have some good things to say about the application of these principles to romantic relationships. Here are a few gems:

As Leland Foster Wood said, “Success in marriage is much more than a matter of finding the right person; it is also a matter of being the right person.” Don’t try to change your partner; it probably won’t happen, and will only lead to resentment. Just focus on being the best person you can be.

Most relationship failures come not from a singular tragedy, but from the lack of little attentions that show the other person they are important. Practice trivial kindnesses.

Beyond kindness, another quality is essential: courtesy. Henry Clay Risner said, “Courtesy is that quality of heart that overlooks the broken gate and calls attention to the flowers in the yard beyond the gate.”

Before you walk through your door after a long day, take a moment to mentally leave the day at the doorstep. There is no need to carry the stresses of the day into your home and burden your family with them.

Conclusion

While there are several legitimately brilliant insights in this book, most of the content will register as common sense. Most concepts are simply a different iteration of, “Be nice to people instead of criticizing them.” The book’s value lies both in its reminder of what we know we should already be doing, and in its illustration of the nuances of kindness toward others.

Mr. Carnegie advocates an approach to human relations that is analytical and proactive, going a step beyond the requirements of civility by thinking in advance about the other person. It seems simple because it is; effective relationships come simply from having the ability to put other people first. This book’s reminders and insights about how to do so practically in everyday life are what have earned it a reputation as one of the most useful relationship books of all time.

A final note: it is interesting to go back and compare each of the author’s points with the perspectives in The 48 Laws of Power. The two books come from radically different angles, but make many of the same points. Combining the two provides a much better picture of what each one is trying to explain.

---

#Readingnotes #Career