The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Steven R. Covey

Summary

You must recognize the difference between character and personality ethics. The first focuses on becoming a person of principle while the latter focuses on training skills or traits that can achieve results you may want. The author argues that you must become a person of character if you are to have any lasting success. Attempts to shape your personality alone will only yield short-term results and eventually character flaws will be uncovered and any success will be thwarted. The seven habits are formulated to start building yourself from the inside out. You start with personal control over your own reactions to the world around you and progress steadily outward. The first three habits strive for a private victory over the self, the second three habits focus on more public victories, and the last habit focuses on continually improving the first six goals in a virtuous cycle of personal development and success.

Key Points

Habit 1: Be Proactive

The first habit is all about recognizing and harnessing your ability to control your responses to the world around you. It’s easy to think that you were forced into a given circumstance or reaction when someone says inflammatory, or you’re stuck in traffic, or the weather rains out the ball game you were going to attend. Instead, you must insert yourself in the tiny gap between the stimulus and your own response. You take responsibility and choose how you respond to the scenario. This shifts accountability for your actions to no one but yourself, but in so doing you gain the power that comes with the control you simultaneously gain over your life. Instead of being in a constant state of response and reactivity, you are actively increasing your influence over the world around you and worrying less about the things that you cannot control.

Habit 2: Begin with The End In Mind

Habit two starts by creating a plan for yourself. This plan is not about what career you want or what you want your retirement to look like. Instead, it’s about who you want to become. What kind of person will you be, what will govern the way you make your decisions, and every subsequent plan for the rest of your life? Choosing the principles that will guide your life and relationships will give you a clear direction on how to make decisions and it will also give you the confidence to stand by those decisions when you have made them. A decision made when you are centered on deliberate principles will have no disruption to you while the same decisions made on the basis of only maximizing your income may unravel relationships, spoil your successes, and sully the joy of the accomplishments you have achieved.

Writing a personal mission statement is a concrete way of visualizing and enumerating the principles that are important to you and guiding the actions and decisions you take. Think of it as a personal constitution that guides the governance of your day-to-day administration. Even the US constitution has amendments. Revisit your mission statement periodically to revise it. This process will continually refine it to reflect what is most important to you.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

The first two habits are the pre-work or the planning for personal development and habit three is the execution of that personal improvement. The first habit gives you recognition of your control of yourself above the environment and the people that surround you. The second habit gives you a plan or a blueprint to follow. Habit three is execution.

Map your life out into the roles you play and use the blueprint you have created for yourself, and your mission statement, to create goals for each of those roles. What results would you like to achieve in business, and what relationships would you like to have with your family? The first two habits give you a framework to categorize all the activities in your life. The four-quadrant matrix categorizes tasks based on importance and urgency. The critical tasks are the non-urgent but important ones. If they are not prioritized, they will never be done.

Habit 4: Think Win-Win

Win-win is a paradigm of human interaction where you fight for the agreement that will satisfy all parties. You are not merely looking for a compromise that lessens the blow on one party. That is considered a Win-Lose or Lose-Win scenario. Win-Win truly elevates relationships, both business and personal, to a level that transcends mere transaction or cooperation but results in mutual prosperity. This paradigm requires an abundance mindset where you recognize that there is enough to go around. There is enough money, enough time, enough care, enough attention, and enough of whatever required resource to result in the win for both sides.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

By prioritizing the understanding of the opposite party or individual before trying to communicate our own thoughts and intentions, you facilitate the acquisition of the empathy required to make any headway. So much of communication is sharing without any understanding. By truly adopting the perspective of another, we aren’t shallowly looking for a way to simply manipulate them, but instead, you practice vulnerability by opening yourself up to change. If you truly understand the motivations and rationale of another, you may end up agreeing with them. From this key step of understanding you can begin to help others understand you.

Habit 6: Synergize

To synergize is to value the differences intrinsic to ourselves and externally between ourselves and others. Those differences can then be utilized to complement each other and achieve results that go beyond the mere sum of the parts but are exponentially or even orders of magnitude greater than the parts themselves. This directly builds on the fourth habit of thinking win-win to achieve results beyond the immediately apparent, and usually sub-prime options. It also demands a high level of communication that must be fueled by the fifth habit of understanding.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

The final habit is one of maintaining the efforts that go into each proceeding habit and sustaining a balance of all four major quadrants of personal or organizational motivation. The quadrants are physical, social/emotional, spiritual, and mental for individuals and financial, people development, human interaction, and purpose for organizations. It takes focused effort to work on these areas as all of them will fall into that critical, important, but not urgent category of tasks that can easily fall by the wayside. However, when these activities are undertaken over sustained periods, the effect is a virtuous cycle that builds on itself and all the other habits to bring more control and success throughout life.

Great Quotes

We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people’s agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

You can’t have the fruits without the roots.

The place to begin building any relationship is inside ourselves.

When you defend those who are absent you retain the trust of those who are present.

Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.

When it comes right down to it, other things being relatively equal, the human dynamic is more important than the technical dimensions of the deal.

Empathic listenging is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It’s a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand.

The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves.

If on’es motives are wrong, nothing can be right. (Arthur Gordon)

Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness.