Discipline: Six Steps to Unleashing your Hidden Potential [Paperback]

Harris Kern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2001

This book describes how to acquire the most important ingredient in one's lifetime: Discipline. With it, you can achieve everything; without it, you will struggle to exist. Those who do will have no limitations in accomplishing their wildest aspirations. Discipline is unique because it is simple, short, and straightforward. It shows you how to block life's unexpected obstacles by establishing rules and guidelines and, more importantly, adhering to them. It shows you how to complete your goals by setting priorities. And it shows you how to prepare for battle everyday, to pick yourself up mentally, to never become complacent, thus illustrating how to always remain focused no matter what the circumstances.The book describes Harris Kern's interpretation of Discipline, what it meant to him, and what it can mean to your own future. It also challenges the common notion that success can be obtained by simply applying a formula, without having to work hard.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harris Kern is a consultant in the field of information technology. After having led a project at Sun Microsystems to re-engineer its systems to run on client-server technology, Harris co-wrote the book Rightsizing the New Enterprise to help other companies adopt his pioneering methodologies. Harris is also the author of three other books on designing and building IT infrastructures. He is executive editor of the Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute series of books, which cover a wide range of enterprise IT enterprise subjects. As a noted speaker and columnist, Harris logs about half a million air miles a year consulting to major corporations around the world on IT operations management for Sun. Bill Rosenblatt is the president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm that serves media companies and media technology vendors. He is a columnist, editor, and the author of three technical books. Howie Lyke is the CEO of Bluewater Information Convergence, Inc. Bluewater delivers comprehensive data center management solutions that include assessments, integration, and fully outsourced solutions, thus serving customers through the entire IT infrastructure lifecycle.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: AuthorHouse (October 29, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0759642982
• ISBN-13: 978-0759642980
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (100 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,112,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Big disappointment, May 29, 2002

By 

Steven Chanan "steevo619" (Atherton, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Discipline: Six Steps to Unleashing your Hidden Potential (Paperback)

As someone who has struggled mightily over the years with self-discipline--inability to get out of bed when I want, countless broken resolutions and promises to myself, procrastination--I wanted to learn HOW to develop what I lacked. Instead, this book is basically a testimonial/memoir of someone with super-human discipline, someone who has seemingly had NO trouble motivating himself to the max at least since he was 13. For those already with pretty good self-discipline, I imagine that this could be inspiring (as evidently it was to other reviewers here). But for someone like me who feels he has very little to build on in this area, Kern's basic "failure is not an option" approach does little good.

The book promotes itself as a self-help book--the subtitle is "Six Steps to Unleashing Your Hidden Potential"--but really these so-called "steps" seem to be thrown in haphazardly on top of all the stories of Kern's amazing achievements. There's no real program here, no clear set of guidelines of what to do to get from where you are to where Kern is. Concepts such as "goals," "contracts," and "priorities" are introduced as if they're important elements of a comprehensive program, but their definitions are vague, contradictory, and overlapping. The book would be much stronger, I think, if it were to shed the misleading self-help trappings and just be a memoir of someone with tremendous discipline.

One final note: the writing in this book is quite poor. If the underlying message were of greater value to me, I would have been better able to overlook this. But as it was, I found myself continually annoyed by bad grammar and vague meaning. I'm all for someone like Kern (an accomplished man who openly admits that writing a book is a big challenge for him) publishing, but I wish he had more fully recognized his limitations and made better use of good editors/copyeditors/proofreaders.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Superficial, July 6, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Discipline: Six Steps to Unleashing your Hidden Potential (Paperback)

Kern is very good in pointing out the problems with self-help books. It is not enough to know what one has to do, the question is how to go about it (think the case of losing weight).
However, Kern does not dwell on the reasons for lacking will, or self-discipline and on how to excercise self-discipline. The big problem of self-discipline is the conflict between the conscient and the sub-conscient. A better book for this is that from Theodore Bryant (Self-discipline in 10 days).
Some readers may be annoyed at the narcissistic style of Kern's book and at the shallowness of his goals.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This One's a Keeper, December 13, 2002

By 

John Beck (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Discipline: Six Steps to Unleashing your Hidden Potential (Paperback)

It's great to read a book from someone who isn't an author by profession & just does their best to share their knowledge with others. It's that raw appeal that drew me to it in the first place, as well as recommendations from a couple friends who also wanted some real insight for once. He speaks to you as someone who really just wants you to understand how much better your life could be if you make a serious effort to embrace discipline. I found his experiences, and anecdotes true to life and although some of it isn't anything new, finding a truly disciplined person is very uncommon anymore. If he was able to discipline himself and attain his level of success and happiness then I'm sure I can do much better for myself using his suggestions. I've heard Mr. Kern may have another Discipline book out soon. If this is true, I'm looking forward to reading that one as well.