The self-help book Bill Clinton used

http://www.amazon.com/Control-Your-Time-Life-Signet/dp/0451167724

by dimitar • 17 years ago

48 27 17 years ago

dimitar2• 17 years ago

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who started his new autobiography, My Life, with a reference to the book:

When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them. I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old. And I’m sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, though I can’t find it. However, I do remember the A list. I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life, and write a great book.

jdminhbg• 17 years ago

One out of five for your bigtime life goals isn't bad.

jfoutz• 17 years ago

i know you're a troll... but which one? 1. still married in spite of everything, I'm pretty sure that puts him in the good 50% of all marriages. 2. kids seem fine. (i don't remember bill's kids on robot chicken) 3. friends. no idea. i bet he's fun at parties. 4. pretty sure u.s. president is the best possible politically. 5. nyt bestseller. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/bestseller/0923besth...

I understand you don't like the guy, but wtf?

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

Will it help me get fellatio?

patrickgzill• 17 years ago

Only thieves, crooks, and whores (political and otherwise) would want to emulate Bill Clinton.

ethikal• 17 years ago

I've been looking for a good self-help book -- particularly one for public speaking / conversing with people. Anybody have a good one (besides this)?

pgbovine• 17 years ago

Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people"

It's a classic for helping you to converse and connect better with people (its contents are much more sincere and wholesome than the semi-cheesy title suggests)

sown• 17 years ago

I have goals sorted out like this but my A-goals just don't seem do-able...it just seems, though, that they're not obtainable.

rjurney• 17 years ago

Have you broken out more achievable goals in the mid and short term? Have you outlined actions to achieve these stepping stones? If you do that, maybe those long term goals aren't unobtainable anymore.

caustic3• 17 years ago

I have a couple of questions.

1. I couldn't find biography of Alan Lakein, the author of the book. Did he achieve something as extraordinary as Bill Clinton did?

2. Could Bill Clinton achieve the same life goals without help from this book?

parenthesis• 17 years ago

According to Wikipedia[1], he "sold over 3 million copies" of the book. That is certainly an achievement, whether or not it was one of his primary life goals.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lakein

caustic3• 17 years ago

> he "sold over 3 million copies" of the book

Then we have 3 million of Bills Clinton?

lallysingh• 17 years ago

No kindle version? You're killing me!

edw519• 17 years ago

7 bucks, 2 hour read, helped someone go from a poor, rural, single parent upbringing to the top of his field. Sounds like a no-brainer. Ordered it.

caustic3• 17 years ago

> helped someone go... to the top of his field

Did it really? I seriously doubt it. Bill might be mistaken. To me it looks like just one of the cognitive biases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Unfortunately we cannot conduct an experiment of having two identical Bill Clinton, one of them read this book while another did not, then see they results.

But among more than 3 million of book readers, how many of them have something as close to Bill Clinton's achievements?

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

Politics is one of those fields where being a little better at it makes you better at a lot of things (e.g. making friends, making compromises, making deals). That's unlike being, e.g., a slightly better programmer (if you're not a programmer already) or being a slightly better lock-picker.

julius_geezer• 17 years ago

"just out of law school": following, that is, graduation from Georgetown University, a Rhodes scholarship, and graduation from Yale Law School. There is an old gibe that a Rhodes Scholar is a young man with a great future behind him, but I suspect that most persons with those credentials do pretty well. Achieving the presidency of the US has so many chance factors in it--would we have heard of GWB had Ronald Reagan picked (say) Richard Lugar to run with him in 1980?--that it makes a tricky argument for political acuity.

The self-help book Bill Clinton used

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