The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (Book Summary)

Powerful lessons in personal change.

We often use social Band-Aids to temporarily fix chronic problems

After working with business and educated people for 25 years, Stephen realized that most individuals might be highly successful, but still struggle with an internal hunger — a deep desire for personal compatibility and effectiveness needed to form healthy, meaningful relationships with others.

They all had familiar problems. Some were struggling to maintain a balance between their work life and family time, while others can’t commit to a new lifestyle or diet. Some people struggle with instilling good values in their kids and end up irritated when the kids didn’t listen. These problems run deep and are painful, so quick fixes can only help for so long.

For instance, when the author’s son was struggling socially, Stephen and his wife, Sandra felt they had to help him so they can be successful in parenting. They kept encouraging him to do well at school and in sports, but nothing worked. They eventually changed their approach after Stephen discussed the perception and communication concepts that he was teaching at IBM with his wife. They realized that their perception of their son was that he was inadequate and should be protected.

A search through 200 years of success writing showed the author that success literature has become superficial over the past 50 years. It was all about social image consciousness, methods, and quick fixes — with social Band-Aids to temporarily address acute problems, instead of the underlying chronic ones.

Meanwhile, in the first 150 years, success literature was mainly focused on character ethics such as modesty, simplicity, industry, integrity, patience, justice, courage, temperance, fidelity, humility, and the Golden Rule. These character ethics constitute the basic principles of effective living. It also taught us that people could only really be successful and happy if they incorporate these principles into their character.

After World War 1, the view of success changed from character ethic to personality ethics. This branches into two paths. One was a positive mental attitude, and the other was human and public relations techniques. Some of this philosophy included inspiring and valid sayings like “Smiling wins more friends than frowning”. But, some were outright deceptive and manipulated, teaching people techniques to make friends and use people.

Stephen and Sandra realized that personality ethic was subconsciously giving them solutions that they were using on their son. Attempts to maintain their social image as good parents were affecting their son’s image. Once they stepped back and corrected the motives and perceptions of him, they saw the potential and unique abilities of their son. They started to enjoy spending time with him without judging him. He grew at his own pace into a social, smart, and active man.

To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

We are naturally proactive and able to choose our response based on our values or conscious decisions

This habit is on the principles of personal vision.

See if you can project yourself as if you are someone else. How does your mind work? Unlike other animals, humans can analyze their thought processes — self-awareness. This allows us to stand apart and analyze how we “see” ourselves — our paradigm, which is the most important paradigm of effectiveness. We can learn and evaluate others. We can also make and break habits.

If the vision of ourselves is as a result of the social mirror, such visions are projections that are often disjointed and out of proportion.

To explain human nature, there are three widely-accepted social maps also known as theories of determinism. Genetic determinism is about what your grandparents did to you i.e. your temper. Psychic determinism is about what your parents did to you i.e. your upbringing. Environmental determinism is about what something or someone in your environment did to you e.g. your rude spouse, national policies, etc.

So, how do these social maps affect our human nature?

Let’s take the case of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, and Jew that was imprisoned in Nazi’s death camps. Most of his family perished there. Frankl himself suffered immensely. However, he was able to maintain his basic identity and control his response to the torture. He achieved this by using his imagination and memory to project himself into different circumstances better than his present situations. This enabled him and others to find dignity in their imprisonment and meaning in their suffering. For Frankl to discover the basic principle of the nature of man, He illustrated a concise self-map that enabled him to develop the first habit of a highly effective person in any circumstances — the habit of Proactivity.

Highly proactive people know that responsibility. They behave according to their values instead of their feelings-based conditions. We are proactive by nature. But, we become reactive based on our choices to allow conditions to control us. Proactive people aren’t affected by external stimuli like the weather, they are value-driven.

It is not what happens to us, but our response to those things that hurt us. Being more self-aware will allow us to examine our behavior and attitudes. And remember that the most proactive thing to do is to smile and be genuinely happy.

The key part of “beginning with the End in Mind” is to start with a clear picture of the end of your life

How about we start with a visualization experiment? Imagine you are at your funeral and observing what your loved ones, colleagues, and friends will say about you and your life. What would you like them to say about you? How do you want to be remembered? To begin with, the end in mind simply means you have to better understand your present situation to take the right steps to get to your final destination.

Thinking about what will be said about you at your funeral will allow you to find your definition of success.

This habit is based on the principle that all things are created twice. For example, if you want to build a company, you start by brainstorming to get ideas of what you want it to look like. If the company will be promoting group work and transparency, then the plan will include open offices or co-working spaces.

Then, you proceed to create a blueprint and develop building plans with details on how it will look. So, once construction has commenced, you don’t have to make changes that might be expensive.

This principle also applies to various aspects of our lives too. For some of us, our first creation is based on our conditioning and training. Then, we proactively design our lives from that first creation and vice versa. Leadership is the first creation that surveys the situation and determines if we are clearing the right jungle, while management is the second creation which determines the efficiency of clearing out the jungle. This means that effectiveness in making the right moves.

In business, no management success can compensate for failed leadership. But since leadership is difficult, we often get stuck in a management paradigm.

Let’s take the case of the president of an oil company who attended a year-long executive development program conducted by Stephen Covey in Seattle. Close to the end, he approached the author and told him that he decided to take action based on the author’s teachings. He became more involved in leadership — problem-analysis, direction, and culture-building issues than management — dealing with urgent matters. Today, their revenues and profits have immensely increased.

As we observed in the previous chapter, proactivity is based on the human’s self-awareness. Therefore, to increase our proactivity and exercise leadership in our personal lives, all we need is conscience and imagination.

Through imagination, we can access our unlimited potentials. Through conscience, we can use our talents and contributions to connect with universal laws to effectively develop them. Since we already live with the ineffective scripts that others handed to us, rescripting is a proactive process of writing our scripts or shifting paradigm.

A good example of rescripting can be seen in the autobiography of Egypt’s former president, Anwar Sadat. He was raised and deeply scripted in hatred for Israel. When he became president, he rescripted his attitude toward Israel by visiting Knesset in Jerusalem and establishing peace movements. Sadat used his conscience, imagination, and self-awareness to build his leadership to change his perspective of the situation.

Using our creativity and imagination, we are responsible to create new and effective scripts that match our deep values.

For example, suppose you always use your authority and size to yell and intimidate your children. Remember, the visualization experiment earlier about you at your funeral. To begin with, the End in Mind will allow you to analyze your parenting role and think of how you want to be remembered by your kids. Then, you will be able to focus on your deepest values as a parent and rescript yourself to match those values.

Once you focus our lives on timeless unchanging principles, we will be able to create an important paradigm of effective living.

Physical creation involves exercising independent will toward becoming principle-centered

As you start to work on the third habit, answer these two questions. What could you do daily to positively improve your life? What is the one thing in your professional life that can have a similar result?

The third habit is the fruit, the practical fulfillment of the first and second habit. It is all about personal management — the daily moments of doing and exercising effective self-management to become principle-centered.

Independent will — in addition to other human talents — enables us to make decisions and act according to them. In our everyday life, our integrity is based on how developed our independent will is. Therefore, if you are an effective manager of yourself, then your discipline will come from within — a function of your independent will.

According to E.M. Gray, Putting First Things First is the one factor shared by all successful people, and it surpasses all other habits. Independent will is a function of your values, rather than a function of your desires or impulses. It is the ability to act with integrity to your proactive first creation.

In the third habit, we are tackling many questions related to time and life management. Each generation uses the info from the previous generation to achieve more control over their lives. The first generation could be characterized by checklists and notes. The focus was on giving some likeness to inclusiveness and recognition to many demands on our energy and time. The second generation could be characterized by appointment books and calendars. An effort to prepare for the future by scheduling future tasks and events. The third generation focuses on setting specific short-, intermediate- and long-term goals. It is the current time-management field. It adds to the previous generation’s importance of prioritization, of having clear values, and of comparing the importance of activities according to those values. Though the third generation prompts people to create a specific plan to achieve goals, people are now starting to feel too restricted and scheduled. They have begun to revert the time management techniques from the first and second generation. The fourth-generation sees time management as a loose term — the actual challenge is to manage ourselves, not time. Now, the focus is on building and maintaining relationships and achieving results i.e. the P/PC balance.

This focus is well illustrated by the Time Management Matrix. We spend time in 4 basic ways. Urgent matters are always in our faces, though they are often unimportant. Meanwhile, important matters contribute to your values, mission, and goals with high priority. Tasks in Quadrant I is known as problems or crisis since they are important and urgent. However, focusing solely on these tasks will overwhelm you. You are knocked down before you recover from the first blow.

Effective people avoid unimportant tasks that dominate Quadrant III and IV. They also lessen the Quadrant I tasks by paying more attention to the ones in Quadrant II. This is because Quadrant II is the key to personal management.

The author asked some shopping center managers on a thing that could have the greatest positive effect on their professional lives. Their reply was to create meaningful relationships with the store owners in the shopping centers — a Quadrant II task. However, the analysis showed that they were only spending less than 5% of their time on that activity. They were pretty swamped with endless quadrant I tasks.

Eventually, the proactive owners spent one-third of their time to build relationships with the tenants. Within a year and a half, their numbers increased by 20%, the tenants were happier and the shopping center managers were more satisfied and effective.

To become effective and achieve similar success, proactively go after Quadrant II tasks.

Win-Win is a way of thinking that continuously seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions

The author once worked with a company whose president was unhappy about the selfishness and lack of cooperation among his employees. When Stephen looked deeper into the company’s issue, he found that this man was the one instigating competition among his people. He was using a paradigm of competition to get his employees to cooperate.

As a leader, your role is to influence others. So, the habit of effective interpersonal leadership is Think Win-Win, one of the six paradigms of human interaction. Win-Win means there is plenty to go around. The success of one person doesn’t spell doom for the others. This lets one view life as a cooperative, not a competitive place. Your mindset continuously seeks mutual benefit in all interactions.

Meanwhile, Win-Lose is a paradigm of the race to Bermuda. This translates to an authoritarian style of leadership. Family, peer groups, athletics, and law are the powerful scripting agencies for the win-lose mentality. People are trained to win to serve as the standard for comparison with others. This mentality breeds competition, not cooperation.

Lose-win is worse than win-lose because it has no standards, expectations, visions, or demands. People with this mentality are always quick to appease or please. They are easily intimidated by others’ ego strength, and they bury their emotions. People with a lose-win mentality serves as a source of energy for them, as they feed on their weaknesses.

Lose-lose is a war philosophy. The result of the relationship between two individuals with a win-lose mentality. They both lose and then try to get even. Some people get so focused on the enemy that they obsess over the desire for that person to lose. So, they become blind to every other thing, even if they get hurt in the process.

People with win mentality just want to get what they want all the time. They always try to secure their ends and leave others to secure their own.

Win-win or no deal is a higher expression of win. If a solution that is beneficial to both parties can’t be reached, they can agree to disagree — no deal. For example, if a family can’t agree to eat pizza, they can simply order something else — no-deal — instead of letting some enjoy pizza at the expense of others.

Each philosophy or mentality has its benefits depending on the situation. For example, you might use the lose-win approach if you see no point in spending hours arguing with a person over irrelevant issues. You know once you give up and lose, the argument is over and you can do something productive with your time.

Therefore, the principle of win-win is essential for successful relationships with others, and it accommodates all the other five interdependent dimensions of life. It starts with character and moves onto relationships, which produces agreements. This is nurtured in a situation where systems and structures are based on the win-win concept.

You need to seek first to understand, then to be understood to come up with win-win solutions

We all tend to quickly fix issues with good advice. We don’t spend much time diagnosing the problem first. This habit is the key to effective interpersonal communication, which is an important skill in our lives. We spend many years learning more about writing, speaking, and reading, but not listening. To communicate effectively with others, you need to understand them. Your character is constantly communicating, people will come to trust or distrust you and your actions based on that, in the long run.

Most people project their home movies onto the behavior of others. We never really understand what is going on inside some else.

For example, the author had a chat with a father who was pissed because his son wouldn’t listen to him. The author asked if the man listened to his son. The man answered that he understood his son because he had been there himself. This man has no clue what is going on in his son’s head. Yet he was using his perspective of the world on his son.

Only a few people practice empathetic listening, the highest form of listening. It means one listens to understand the speaker. You view the world through that person’s lens, you get to know their paradigm and you understand how they feel. Empathetic listening is a huge deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It is super therapeutic and healing because it provides an individual with psychological air. Then, you can focus on problem-solving or influencing the person.

Though, it is also risky. Empathetic listening requires a lot of security to have a deep listening experience because this makes you vulnerable. To influence someone, you have to be influenced too. This is why the first, second, and third habits are so essential — they provide you with a solid inner core that enables you to handle the outer vulnerability with peace and strength.

Experiencing synergy is more powerful than discussing it because it is better to produce something new than the same old things

Synergy is the highest activity in all life. We need to apply the principle of creative cooperation in our interactions with other people. Since, synergy allows us to unify, catalyze, and release the greatest power inside us.

When you incorporate synergy into communication, your mind, heart, and expressions will become open to new options and possibilities. When such communications start, you might not be sure about how things will go, but you have an internal sense of adventure and excitement that things will improve.

For example, during a class on leadership philosophy and style, one of the author’s students shared some emotional personal experiences. This kick-started a synergistic, unique, and cohesive culture that lasted beyond the semester. Other students become more open and willing to share their own experiences. To date, these class members still hold alumni meetings.

The outcome of communication and openness is phenomenal and exciting.

Valuing the differences in people is the essence of synergy. We can achieve this by seeing the world how they see it. A highly effective person has the reverence and humility to know his limits and to appreciate the resources available through the interactions with other’s minds and hearts.

Sharpen your saw by renewing emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical aspects of your life

This habit encompasses the paradigm of other habits because it makes them possible. It revolves around preserving your most valuable asset — you. You need to renew your emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical dimensions of your nature consistently in the best ways possible.

We have to be proactive to do this. Sharpening the saw is a Quadrant II task that must be done. To be a highly effective person, you need to know the importance of taking time to do this.

The physical dimension includes ways to effectively care for our physical body — eating a balanced diet, exercising, and getting enough sleep. All of this will allow us to maintain and improve our capacity to work and enjoy. Renewing the spiritual dimension improves personal leadership. Some people do this by praying and meditating. Most of our study discipline and mental development comes from school. But, as soon as we leave, we allow our minds to deteriorate. Proactive people always find new ways to educate themselves — a vital mental renewal. We can renew our emotional/social dimension by interacting with people daily.

For instance, the focus of Viktor Frankl was on the need for purpose and meaning in our lives, something that surpasses our own lives and accesses the best energies inside us.

Although it is essential to renew each dimension, we will only become highly effective if we handle all four dimensions in a smart and balanced way.

Conclusion

Improving your perspective and life will teach you about your responsibility to yourself and others. And the basic habits that you learn will enable you to progress to bigger and better things. To get started, visualize yourself at your funeral and write down the impressions you had. This along with resource materials like quotes, notes will help you to write your statement and discover the purpose of your life. Furthermore, developing a win-win agreement when you are attempting to negotiate a solution while improving your persuasion skills.

Try this:
Write down 5 personal or work problems and find a solution for each one. Make a list of activities that will help you to renew yourself and try to be proactive for 30 days. Base your next presentation on empathy.

Writer’s notes:
This is a summary of the book The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. — These are not his words but rather a re-write of what was taken away from reading the book. Reading this summary will not give you the same feel and impact as reading the full book, so if you liked what you’ve read here, it is recommended to acquire the kindle, audio, or hardcover. This will not only support the author that inspired this post but also allow you to dive into this perspective a bit more.