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Highly Effective Habits Are Highly Ineffective
No offense to bestselling author Stephen Covey, but the habits of highly effective people mean diddly squat to me. Why? Because those people are not me. I’m not going to emulate the highly effective habits of someone highly effective with the hopes that those highly effective habits will make me a highly effective copy of them.
They won’t.
In fact, that whole highly effective strategy is highly ineffective.
Since I’m a writer, I’ll explore some habits of highly effective writers. Ernest Hemingway preferred to write the first thing in the morning. I prefer to sleep until the third or possibly fourth thing in the morning. Also, I hate fishing. Thomas Wolfe wrote ten pages a day, triple spaced, not stopping until he reached 1800 words. He also fondled his genitals while writing until “the sensuous elements in every domain of life became more immediate, real, and beautiful.” Sounds like a foppish euphemism for something other than 1800 words. Pass. Maya Angelou liked to rent a hotel room near her home and write there every day for months while lying on the unchanged bed. I know why the caged bird has Norovirus. Each of these work habits of highly effective writers shares one key characteristic — they have nothing whatsoever to do with me. Or you. #JustSaying
