The seven habits of highly effective people
Because I’ve been driving back and forth from Corvallis to Portland so much lately to attend to my mother and cousin, I’ve had ample to time to listen to audiobooks. I find that I’m actually grateful for the opportunity to “read” in this fashion. (Like many folks, the past decade has destroyed my attention span and ability to read for long periods.)
![[The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book cover]](https://axis-monolith.live/wp-content/uploads/the-seven-habits-of-highly-effective-people.webp "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People")
I’m currently reading Stephen R. Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. (Five stars on Amazon in 5672 reviews!) I read the book once long, long ago — sometime during the mid-1990s. I’ve referred to it now and then as the years have gone by, but mostly I’ve forgotten its lessons.
Or so I thought.
In reality, it turns out that much of my life philosophy is similar to the precepts Covey covers. It’s shocking, in fact, just how much of my personal and financial philosophies align with those presented in Seven Habits. I haven’t consciously or deliberately emulated his teachings, but I’ve wound up in the same place nonetheless.
For those unfamiliar, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People are as follows:
- Be proactive. Take responsibility for your own life. Take the initiative and don’t simply accept what you’re given. (Here are my thoughts on becoming proactive.)
- Begin with the end in mind. Have a plan for your life. Know where you want to go — and why. Like me, Covey is a proponent of writing a personal mission statement.
- Put first things first. Sort out your priorities (which is much easier to do when you have an end in mind). Focus your attention on the things that are urgent and important. Covey’s “big rocks” metaphor comes from this section (see video below).
- Think win-win. When possible, seek mutually beneficial solutions to problems. Don’t be adversarial. Help others achieve their aims as you achieve yours.
- Seek first to undertand, then to be understood. Don’t be in a rush to be right. Listen to what others are saying. (Truly listen.) Practice empathy. I feel like this is a seldom-practiced skill in modern society, which is why I urge people to practice financial empathy.
- Synergize. Find ways to work with others in order to achieve mutual aims and accomplish things that you couldn’t do alone.
- Sharpen the saw. Make time for personal renewal. Keep your lifestyle balanced. Pursue self-improvement.
It’s also worth noting that apparently Covey is responsible for coining the terms “abundance mindset” and “scarcity mindset”. (That’s what Wikipedia says, anyhow. I’d need to do further research before I actually accepted this as a fact.) I too believe strongly that each of us should foster an abundance mindset, when possible.
While there’s much that’s the same between my philosophy and Covey’s, things aren’t completely identical.
Covey talks about dependence and independence, as I do, but he takes things to another level by discussing interdependence. I like this. Independence, Covey says, is superior to dependence. It’s better to be self-reliant than to depend on others to fulfill your needs. But, he says, it’s even better to work together to achieve common aims. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I agree with him, but I haven’t (yet) incorporated this belief as part of my life philosophy. Perhaps I will in the near future.
Covey goes down some rabbit holes that I don’t find particularly important. (I just listened to a half-hour segment on the values that make up our personal “centers”. Meh.) Plus, he continually praises human beings as different in “kind” from other animals as opposed to different “in degree”. I disagree with him 100%. (I believe that humans are just another animal, and there’s nothing particularly remarkable about us other than we’re currently the dominant species on the planet.)
Small quibbles aside, I’m finding The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to be a remarkable book precisely because its philosophy is so aligned with my own. When I read it at age 25, I dismissed it as self-help pap. I was wrong. Or, more precisely, I wasn’t ready to perceive its wisdom.
I’m not sure how my philosophy ended up so closely aligned with Covey’s. It’s very possible that reading this book 25+ years ago planted seeds in my subconscious that have grown over the years and now have produced fruit that resemble his. But it’s also possible that my beliefs are simply a by-produce of age and experience, that many people reach these same conclusions in time.
Anyhow, I’m eager to finish my work today at the family box factory. Once I run payroll and meet with our accountant, I’ll drive back to Corvallis. And when I do, I’ll listen to another 90 minutes of Seven Habits. I can’t wait!
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There are 7 comments to "The seven habits of highly effective people".
Funny how different people react to the same book.
I’m a voracious reader. For example, last year, in my first year of retirement, I read 128 books.
But this is one of the few books in my life that I couldn’t finish. It was so BORING.
I suppose this means that I’ll never be highly successful.
🙂
Haha. I can see why you’d think it was boring. In fact, that’s what I used to think of it too! That’s my memory of it: boring. And this morning as I was listening to the whole self-centered, family-centered, church-centered, blah blah blah stuff, it was boring. But I think the reason I’m so intrigued by it now is that my views on life have become remarkably similar to the author’s.
When I was 22 and started my first job after college, my employer had us attend a seminar about the 7 Habits put on by Stephen Covey & Associates. I vividly remember doing the exercise of writing my obituary to “start with the end in mind” and being given an enormous binder containing a planner/calendar afterwards, which I used until Palm Pilots appeared. 😀
More than 30 years later, I can say that it set me on a good path.
I never read the book, but I own a copy.
I just read this for the first time last month and I had a really hard time with it. As a woman in a male dominated industry I couldn’t separate my own lens from the reading of it. It felt so sexist (anecdotes about business are all about men, stories about women are about parenting or volunteering, with only one nurse). I will say that I think steps 2 and 3 are valid. And steps 1 and 5 could be helpful for a particular sort of person, but these areas area that I think could actually harm women in business (if they were to take his anecdotes prescriptively.)
I think 6 and 7 are cr*p (as he presents them) and I was actually like, “oh, this is the book that seems to have laid the ground work for corporate “self care” as an alternative to actually giving people a break.
Yeah, I can tell that Covey is trying to be non-sexist, but he’s doing so in 1989 so it still seems harsh in 2022. I’m nearing the end of step 3 right now, so haven’t heard what he has to say about the final four habits. I like the bullet-point version of them, though!
Last night (after I published this piece), I listened to most of habit 3 on my drive home. I have to say that it kind of blew my mind. It was eye opening. So many of my personal struggles are related to me not putting First Things First. Covey talks about a matrix of urgent and important. Some things are urgent+important, others are urgent/non-important, others are non-urgent/important, and still others are non-urgent/non-important. I’m great at handling stuff in quadrant 1 (urgent+important) but I suck at handling stuff in quadrant 2 (non-urgent/important). He says productive/effective people try to live in quadrant 2. Doesn’t sound like mind-blowing stuff in my short description here, but seriously it was a revelation. Why don’t I do more at GRS? Because it’s non-urgent/important, and I rarely get to stuff in that quadrant. I need to change that.
Back in the mid-90s when it was all the rage I was sent to a seminar with Covey and Associates. Gag me with a spoon as we said back then. The Government spending my tax dollars to make me listen to religious BS really pissed me off. This brand of sexism might have seemed progressive to Covey back in 1989, but it sure seemed sexist to me in the 90s. Then add in psycho babble to completely drive me over the edge.
All that made it seem like it should have been called 7 Habits of Effective Straight Married Religious Men. In other words the opposite of me so hard pass. Maybe he had some good points, but I’ll never know.
You, or somebody, mentioned this book recently and so I ordered it. It’s in my short stack of to read next books. I’m in my 70s so I’m not struggling with work or career decisions, but I always like self improvement, so I will read it with one eye on the above mentioned criticisms.