Seven Habits Of Highly Ineffective People

The most powerful anti-self-help book you didn’t know you needed

I wrote this last week for a humor publication on Medium called MuddyUm. Republishing it here. You should go check them out when you are done reading this.

Also, a request: If you liked this, please leave a like on the post. It does two things: a) Lets the sweet algos know that you liked it which in turn helps the posts rank up in Substack and b) Lets me know you liked it so I know what you like and what you don’t. Contrary to popular belief, I too have a learning model in my head that can be trained to produce what you like.

Some highly ineffective people

The book that doused thousands of flames — one of the most iconic books on underperformance ever written.

“After reading this book, I felt an overwhelming urge to become a bean counter for the bureau of redundancy.” — Tim Ferris

“It’s like ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ but if you didn’t want to do those things.” — Dale Carnegie

“An excellent manual for modern inefficiency. Kafka would be proud.” — George Orwell

“A page-turner, primarily because I didn’t buy the Kindle edition.” — Mark Twain

“Like Marie Kondo for your life, if Marie Kondo was all about sparking apathy.” — Stephen Colbert

Stephen R. Covey’s bestselling ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ continues to sell to this day. Like a gym membership or extended warranty, it’s an aspirational purchase toward an unreachable dream. Many people around the world have failed to unlock the door to their potential without realizing that they are standing in front of the wrong house. Drunk.

All the effective people haven’t achieved much, anyway. They’ve only warmed the planet, built Facebook, and invented cold plunges — all terrible afflictions!

Enter this book. It’s the playbook for anyone who is tired of wanting to win and instead wants to master the fine art of being ineffective. From the same mind that brought you ‘The Subtle Art of Shifting Blame’ and ‘How to Overthink Your Every Move’, comes the new masterpiece. To quote The New York Times: ‘The book is ten pages shy of three hundred and about two hundred and ninety pages more than necessary.’

Filled with no real-world examples and full of inexact guidelines, this book is irrelevant, painfully inaccurate, and the most powerful anti-self-help book you didn’t know you needed. If you can’t join them, fight them.

This deluxe, overstuffed edition contains seven game-changing habits that can take you from being a wannabe slacker to a Grandmaster of goofing off. Here’s a summary:

Habit 1: Overreact to every single thing in your life

They say that when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rainforest, you could lose your job half a world away. Instead, be the butterfly. Flap your wings. Shout.

The Starbucks lady has gotten your name completely wrong? Ignore the order and stand there until someone asks you, ‘Sir, can you pick up the order?’ just so you can say ‘But, that’s not me!’ Paper jammed in the printer at your office? Write an email to your boss tabulating potential productivity loss for the next year due to ‘the event.’

Habit 2: Start things with fanfare

Starting things is a skill. Channel your inner Apple and make the most dramatic launch of every single activity in your life. It’s all about the beginnings and many at that. Have an idea for a novel? Announce it to the world with a press release. Inspired by a cooking show on a slow Thursday? Send out a quick update to your family and friends in the group chat — ‘Save your hunger! A new Michelin star Indian chef is coming,’ — and start assembling an array of kitchen gadgets with unpronounceable names. Go big or go ho…Nope. Go big and go home.

Habit 3: Multitask like there’s no tomorrow…literally

Do we really know if we will survive another day? Between the world turning into a sauna, AI replacing us with sentient robots whose idea of Netflix and Chill is to build another electric car, and aliens being revealed in Mexican congress, we’re all basically living the last act of a dystopian thriller.

Throw away your to-do list and instead have a do-everything-now-before-the-world-ends list. Alternate manically between “pay electricity bills” to “Go viral as a culinary sensation on TikTok” to “Conduct funeral for grandma” with seamless abandon.

Habit 4: Think lose-lose

When engaged in game theory dances with other people, always think of mutually assured disappointment. It is way better than the bitter taste of losing when they win. For instance, in group projects, seize ownership early on and deliver a dumpster fire of a final presentation. Start a reply-all stampede over email — there’s no better joy than hundreds of people yelling over email “Can everyone stop ‘replying all’ and take me off this chain!”

Habit 5: Keep ’em guessing

Three foolproof ways to be a human enigma: a) play dumb at the most unexpected times, b) speak in riddles, and c) be wildly unpredictable. Schedule meetings on calendars with the title: “Preliminary Placeholder for the Actual Meeting That’s Definitely Not Now,” without sending the actual meeting invite. Invite friends over to your house for the first time. When they arrive, pretend to be surprised but greet them warmly, offer just one bag of snacks, a TV remote with no batteries, a single copy of ‘And Then There Were None’ and leave stating that you need to run some errands.

Habit 6: Practise being worse at something

Everyone practices to get better at things because it's the easy thing to do. What’s hard is to actively practice getting worse at something. Know how to play the piano? Try and see how you can get worse at playing it. Get good at it. People talk a lot more about a party where someone danced terribly than one where someone danced well.

Habit 7: Work hard, not smart

Remember Rome was not built in a day. Why then, must be your laundry? The trouble with the world today is that we do things too fast and need to invent new things. Delegation is the Devil’s work and automation is for robots. Instead, make multiple visits to the grocery store each day, buying just one item every time. When in a cafe, place exacting and cryptic orders separately for espresso, milk, and sugar and mix your own latte. Scroll through a thousand emails to find what you are looking for.

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Join the fifteen other customers (three are not blood relatives!) on this journey into the gloriously middling world of ineffectiveness. Whether you are a team looking to find a place at the bottom of a championship, an organization that wishes to set an industry-wide example of what not to be, or an individual sick of pursuing personal betterment — this is money well spent.

Could be Worse,

Tyag

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