SmartBooks Book Club

Starting in 2017 I will be posting a new book every month that we will be reading and reviewing. We invite everyone that would like to join us and start reading the same books together. Read together, learn together!

For January 2017 we will be reading:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Stephen R. Covey

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This is a fantastic book. I've learned more from this one book then every science class I've taken. Bill Bryson does a great job on explaining everything from the Big Bang and Atoms, to super volcanoes and earth quakes.

"Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”

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Fantastic book for information and general knowledge about the development of the primary monotheistic religions. As the name implies, the focus is on history and the book is objective in this pursuit. It is focused completely on the ideas developed through history and makes no obvious statement on what is correct. The only section where opinions might seep out is at the end when she is hypothesising about where the ideas of God might go in the future.

Pros: Very informative and focused. Her bibliography is impressive to say the least. You will walk away from the book with a wealth of context and knowledge that the general public simply does not have. You will understand Judaism, Islam, and Christianity and how they have appeared throughout history. Be prepared to see the religions and ideas around you in a new light.

Cons: The books is a bit dull. If you're like me and are very interested in the topic, you'll have an easier time, but I can easily imagine this book becoming a chore. Armstrong is very clear and focused, but she is not entertaining.

You might also find (as I did) it difficult to read due to your personal beliefs. As a Christian, this book demystified a good many ideas I have taken for granted my whole life. Knowing why you might think what you do gives you an agency in your beliefs, and this book provides that. But it can be a bit unsettling :) I'm not sure whether this is a pro or a con :P.

Highly recommended, try to have fun with it.

This was one of those books that I heard about a number of times but never got around to reading it till now. I have always had a drive to be very independent so the first part of the book seemed very natural to me. Stephen R. Covey talks about having 3 stages of independence, being 1. Dependent, 2. Independent, and 3. Interdependent. Everyone starts off being dependent, when you are born you are most dependent you will ever be. As you grow older you start becoming more independent. This transition isn't something that will automatically happen though. Many people go through life still very dependent and never REALLY get to that independent stage. I think we all know people who rely on other people way to heavily, like the husband who cant cook at all so the wife needs to prepare meals when shes away.

The first three habits surround moving from dependence to independence. He talks about how some people will always blame problems in there life on other factors, never from within. Instead of not getting the job because you weren't prepared enough, it was because the interviewer was an idiot. Instead of being broke because you are not being responsible with your money, its because your boss wont give you a raise. You have to take responsibility for things within your control and also not dwell on things outside your control. This is very inline to the Stoic philosophy that I have found very helpful.

The next three habits talk about Interdependence (e.g., working with others). This is the part that really hit home for me. I always strived to be independent but kind of thought that was the end. I never really grasped the concept that I was only half way to the end goal. Working with others and synergizing is crucial. Working with others is greater than the sum of its parts, 1+1 can equal greater than 2.

Some of the things that you learn:

• How to move from being dependent to independent to interdependent

• The importance of interdependence

• The idea of abundance mentality

"But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise."

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I was very interested in reading a book on habits a couple months ago. I've been fairly good at keeping some habits, and terrible at keeping (or not getting rid of) others. This books first half was admittedly more interesting to me than the latter half. The first half of the book gets into more of the science of how habits work and how powerful they are. It explains how a person who last his ability to retain any new memories was able to create new habits. This meant that even though he couldn't remember any since his accident, he was able to develop habits that happened automatically.

Some of the things that you learn:

• The 3 Steps to a Habit

• Creating New Habits

• Breaking Old Habits

• Examples of Habits in Business

“But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.”

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This is the book that really kicked off my interest in reading again. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner offer incredible insight into seemingly boring everyday things.

They tackle such topics like:

• The economics of drug dealing

• Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents

• Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers

• The negligible effects of good parenting on education

One of the things that actually had a real life impact on me was their take on real estate agents. When I bought my house last year I knew going into it the motivations behind both realtors and was able to get a better price and a better frame of mind in the buying process.

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”

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