How to Read the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ So That It Holds Up

The massive bestseller (still!) is really outdated, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful

Jacqueline Detwiler
Forge
Published in
8 min readAug 14, 2020

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Illustration: Tara Anand

This story started as a takedown. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a cornerstone of the business self-help canon, a genre given to saccharine platitudes and lampoonable poster

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Jacqueline Detwiler
Forge
Writer for

Jacqui is the former articles editor at Popular Mechanics. Her work has appeared in Wired, Esquire, Men’s Health, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.