G B Prabhat has an interesting perspective and approach to the malady that most people in the world are struggling with – how to improve one’s quality of life. The very first sentence in the first chapter of the book, titled Maximum Person – Dramatically Improving The Quality Of Your Life Using Management Techniques reads, “ The time has come for humankind, in its evolution, to launch a concerted initiative to take control of the quality of individual lives and improve it continuously.” What is his approach to deal with the issue at hand? In the preamble he goes on to say: ”The central thesis of this book is that the wisdom of business corporations be adapted and applied to guarantee a high quality of our lives in the same way businesses control and guarantee the quality of their products.”
In Chapter 2 of the book, the author lays out, with a lot of data that our quality of life is in deep decline. He quotes India-specific data that non-communicable lifestyle diseases – cardiac disease, cancer and diabetes, for example, account for 53 per cent of all deaths. It is common knowledge that these lifestyle diseases are directly correlated with poor quality of life. What is alarming is that increasingly these health issues are becoming more and more prevalent among young adults. One statistic says that in 60 hospitals of the Apollo Hospitals group, 20 per cent of the heart attack cases they attend to are patients in the 25–35 age group. Alarming indeed!
The author then establishes that the key reason for the decline in quality of life is the unprecedented and ever-increasing stress, which he defines as “anything that has an adverse mental or physical impact”. The higher the stress the lower the quality of life. He defines the cause of stress as a stressor and goes on to list ten different stressors which afflict most of us. I found this section most useful and am listing below just to help the reader relate to these stressors in his or her life: The New Poverty Of Sleep; Overworking; Bizarre Engagement With The Online World; Coping With Zero Privacy; FOMO; Rating Rational Intelligence Over Emotional Intelligence; The Fall Of The Family As An Institution; Political Correctness; Increase In Longevity; Global Warming.
Many of them are your issues too? I thought so! Prabhat explains each of these stressors in some detail and their interconnectedness in impacting our quality of life.
Maximum person
He then introduces the concept of Maximum Person as one who assumes responsibility for and takes control of improving the quality of her life. The rest of the book presents details of how individual efforts in following clear processes along with societal and institutional processes can help the Maximum Person achieve a better quality of life. Tools and techniques used in businesses are explained along with suggestions on how they can be adapted for use by the Maximum Person. One key concept of the Quality movement in businesses is emphasized: Process determines quality of a product or service. To achieve a high quality of life, one needs appropriate life processes!
After reading the book, I realized that Prabhat has lucidly presented the concepts with many examples. It was a great intellectual exercise to read the book, but was left wondering that we human beings are creatures of habits and that for any real change to happen we need to change our habits. Improving our quality of life would mean that we need to remove some of our existing habits which make as follow processes that are harmful and develop new habits that will help us follow processes which will lead to better quality of life. I thought one should use Maximum Person to identify the new habits that we need to develop and use other excellent books available, like The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg or The Atomic Habits by James Clear, to achieve the change in habits.
There you have it: To become a Maximum Person, identify your stressors, pick and choose some of the tools and techniques used in businesses, adapt them for application in one’s personal life to avoid the stressors and put processes in place to develop new habits.
- by G B Prabhat
- Publisher: Productivity & Quality Publishing
- Pages: 138 Price: Rs 243
(The reviewer is an entrepreneur and co-founder, Proklean Technologies)