The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey Quotes - Summary

Summary


Be Proactive.
Being proactive means taking responsibility for every aspect of your life; initiative and taking action will then follow. Change starts from within. Make the decision to improve your life through the things that you can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.

Begin with the End In Mind.
Document your perception of your vision in life. Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Set long-term goals. Visualize.

Put First Things First.
Prioritize thoughtfully. Work on short-term goals but not at the expense of seemingly less urgent tasks that are in fact very important. Work on your personal mission, balance between production and building production capacity.

Think Win/Win.
Look for mutually beneficial solutions.

Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.
The basis for good interpersonal relationships.

Synergize.
Describes a way of working in teams. Value differences, collaborate, use creativity. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Sharpen the saw.
Regain and build production capacity/capability by engaging in carefully selected (and balanced) recreational activities that will allow personal renewal (physical, mental, social/emotional and spiritual).



Quotes, all by Stephen Covey


Look at the word responsibility—“response-ability”—the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.


Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.


You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”


While you can think in terms of efficiency in dealing with time, a principle-centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness in dealing with people.



Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.


The key is not to prioritize your schedule but to schedule your priorities.



Trust is the highest form of human motivation.



Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.



Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do—learn, commit, and do—and learn, commit, and do again.



Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, “How do you maintain that serenity and peace?” He replied, “I never leave my place of meditation.” He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.



Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.



A long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.



The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.