After a long summer break from class, I have once again returned to my “management interested course” and I am just as underwhelmed by it as usual. I’m still going to participate in it and put in an honest, good-faith effort since I want to one day do some kind of management stuff, but it is difficult not to look at the course I’m taking and the classes I’ve sit through with the jaded eye of someone who has watched management make mistake after mistake once the person who’d historically held the reigns passed away. Most of those mistakes were largely harmless and the rest are eased by the number of competent people involved who are able to negate–or at least reduce–any potential harm that might be done. Plus, they’re infrequent enough that the company I work for is still doing great. It’s really not a bad place to work most of the time, even as miserable as I can sometimes get when the stress piles on and I’m struggling to continue working at all, but it is undeniable that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias clouding the judgment of large swathes of the upper administration here, almost all of which becomes nakedly visible during these courses as one VP after another presents something they’re supposedly an expert in. That said, there are a few who clearly know what they’re talking about and while I might take issue with their presentations for other reasons, there’s no denying that the person presenting the current bastardization of the “7 habits of highly effective people” self-help/philosophy course knows his stuff.

Most of the issues I had with the course came with the unrealistically definitive verbiage used in the course we were supposed to complete prior to the live class. There’s plenty of buzzword bingo, a bunch of weirdly self-deterministic suggestions, a complete lack of acknowledgment that rest is important, and a fairly toxic amount of exhortations to take control of your own life since anything else is ceding power to other people. The text even goes so far as to suggest that the emotional and mental content of any situation is wholly dependent on you. After all, all of the power in a situation or dynamic is held by you, who can freely reframe whatever is going on as positive or good or within your power if you just frame it correctly in your mind. Don’t let things happen to you (the text calls this reactive behavior), take control and be the person doing things (proactive behavior). I know that I take particular umbrage with this bullshit sentiment because I have dealt with a lot of trauma in my life and am incredibly aware of the limits of my own power in most situations, and that’s just the interpersonal stuff. In a broader, more societal sense, I also don’t have much power since I’m a lower-middle class millennial with student debt. The most powerful I ever get to be in determining the world I live in is during presidential elections and that’s because I live in a swing state that used to be safely blue but was driven so far to the right by the reactionary bullshit of the post 9/11 era that all of the state’s progressive ideals got thrown away in favor of giving power to a bunch of asshole con men.

It just really strikes me as incredibly unhealthy to preach the ultimate power of a “proactive” mindset given how easy it is to find yourself in a situation in which that kind of thinking is harmful. After all, it’s a very short step from that sort of unquestioning vision of self-direction to blaming yourself for something bad that happened to you as a result of someone else’s actions. No amount of proactive thinking is going to fix a situation where another person’s deliberate or negligent abuse of power has brought you harm. You can’t proactive your way out of being hit by a car or being mugged at gunpoint. No amount of self-determination is going to keep you safe if, like me, you live in the country that is the world-leader of domestic gun violence. Any amount of thinking that you can be absolute with this kind of radical self-determination is only going to make you more miserable should it ever come crashing down around you. Sure, really bad stuff happening to people is a statistical outlier most of the time (COVID deaths being a common exception to the rule, since it is so damn easy to get sick as a result of someone else’s choices and actions), but it is still something that happens to people. It has happened to me! I’m one of those people that bad stuff has happened to and if I thought that I was actually in control of my life as much as this text is suggesting I am, I doubt I’d have lived this long. Sometimes, things happen to you and they’re outside your control. Sure, you can choose how you react to that stuff, but controlling your reactions and controlling what happens to you is a degree of nuance that this text refuses to grapple with.

Beyond that somewhat darker side of things, it’s difficult not to see the “rise and grind” mindset in its infancy within this books’ descriptions of how you should apply its philosophies to your life. After all, the text suggests figuring out how to spend all your time on self-improvement and proactive work to get ahead. There was literally no room for rest or inactivity and the text even faulted inactivity as being wasteful when you could be “reading self-improving literature” or “honing your mind or body via training.” It’s kinda disgusting, to be honest, and I might have just quit the course all together if the instructor hadn’t stepped in during this part of his class to add notes about rest being important and how sometimes doing nothing now can help you do more later. That sort of aside was repeated a lot throughout the class, as the instructor took the time to deviate from the text we all had to go through for the class (which he had created!) and soften some of the more rigid aspects of this 7-Habit lifestyle. Noting all that down, the meta-text that he built around the text (which he’d also built out of various other resources) we were all supposed to read, was probably the most interesting part of the course for me, actually.

It really got me thinking about the sort of person who found this 7-Habits stuff useful, as the instructor claimed to, and people like myself who don’t find it particularly useful. I mean, I don’t find it useful since I basically already live my life in a way that coheres to the core of this philosophy, only without the rigid structures that I chafed against while reading the text. I’m also not sure I’d find it useful if I didn’t already live my life in this manner, at least in some way or another. A person prone to blaming others for their failings isn’t going to suddenly change that behavior because a book told them to. A person like that probably also won’t be picking up the book at all, unless they’re actively trying to change. So it’s difficult to imagine this VP, this high-level manager, reading through this text and finding it actually useful unless he was already doing this stuff on some level and this text just gave him the framing he needed to formalize it. I’m not trying to say that I don’t think anyone can change because of stuff like this self-help book or the course that I’m taking or that finding the right framing isn’t super important to some people’s attempts to change, just that I find it unlikely that this course will have a huge impact on anyone’s life. There’s a bit of a selection bias at play here that I’m not sure it’s possible to navigate around.

Part of me wonders what would happen if I tried to talk to the instructor about this. He’s very much a people person, so I expect that he would admit that there are, of course, many such exceptions to the philosophy espoused by the text he is teaching and that he couldn’t go over all the exceptions without making it into a year-long course and probably even admit that good personal philosophy requires reading widely while only bringing home the things that work for you and your situation. I doubt it would cause him much concern or worry or that he’d even change the course to more overtly acknowledge this truth. After all, most of the people taking this course are already doing the introspection required to realize that a lack of exceptions in the text doesn’t mean exceptions don’t exist. I just worry that, if there is someone for whom this text and philosophy are a revelation, this will wind up doing them more harm than good. I’m especially worried given that the idea that some people don’t know or practice this stuff is the entire premise for the class as a whole. Maybe I should say something. I bet that would really expand my circle of influence…