COLUMN: Day planners for the modern soul

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99Like half my fellow human beings, I resolved on New Year's to manage my time better. As far as resolutions go, mine was particularly unoriginal. But little did I know when I walked into the Franklin Covey store in the in the Liberty Place Mall in Center City that time management is just the first step on a yuppie spiritual journey to personal and professional bliss. "To help you think further about the kind of person you would like to be, let's imagine you've lived a fulfilling, rewarding life and now it is your eighty-sixth birthday. Many of the people you love and respect are there to celebrate with you and pay you tribute.... Write the tribute you would like to receive from each person on the lines outside of the appropriate box." Welcome to the "inspirational" world of Stephen Covey. Covey taught business management and organizational behavior for 20 years at Brigham Young University before becoming the most revered management guru in America. His book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which appeared in 1989, has sold over ten million copies and has been translated into 28 languages. Covey has written several spinoffs of his 7 Habits, and he helped to found Franklin Covey, a consulting company that also makes personal time-management and inspirational aides such as the Franklin Planner. In a way, he is this generation's Dale Carnegie. But he does more than just tell you how to win friends and influence people; he tells you how to transform your life. The social critic Alan Wolfe has written that "one reason for Covey's success surely lies in the fact that, in contrast to old-fashioned management gurus such as Peter Drucker, today's purveyors of managerial wisdom aspire not to the profane but to the sacred. It is not gaps in production they seek to fill, but gaps in the spirit.... And now Covey joins them, adding to the mix one of the world's truly remarkable religious traditions: Mormonism." Mormon theology, Wolfe informs us, is particularly suited to the self-help ethic of our capitalist age. Unlike most other Christians, Mormons believe in a nearly all-forgiving God. They do not believe in hell, they believe merely in degrees of heaven. And they believe has free will to determine his course in life. In their world, there is no predestination, damnation or even unkind fate. Covey has taken these tenets and applied them to one's personal and professional life. He and his millions of followers believe they can pinpoint seven basic "principles that govern human effectiveness -- natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably 'there' as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension." These common-sense habits -- such as "be proactive," "put first things first" and "think win/win" -- will, the argument goes, help you take charge of your life. After the roller coaster that was my life last semester, I'm all for it. Yet, the fatalist in me is skeptical. In the afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth reflects on his youthful illusion that he could exert control over his life. "I was about to manufacture a future," Roth writes of his first years out of college, "though without the least idea that it could well be the future that would be manufacturing me.... Regardless of all those splendid things you might manage to do to perfection and with all your strength, you were unlikely to make any impression on that antagonist to individual will who is all-encompassing and wholly impersonal, the great pervasive Anti-You that someone with a grudge might prefer to call God." Philip Roth is, needless to say, not a Mormon. Nor am I. But as I start my last semester of school, I want to be illusioned. I want to believe , as my Franklin Planner wants me to, that my life has a Mission Statement. I want to believe that all my Values and Roles have Clarifying Statements to help navigate them. I want to believe that I will never have to judge others, that I will always listen empathically. But knowing me, my life will already have begun to unravel by the time this column is printed. Like Alexander Portnoy, I will succumb to perverse longings I cannot understand. I will date exotic golden women who suck out my marrow and leave me for dead. I will masochistically seek refuge with my hovering mother and anal father. I will sabotage relationships by lashing out in anger or going into hiding when I feel insecure. Come to think of it, this is how most people's lives are. Even, I would bet, Stephen Covey's.