The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary in 10 Words

The only self-help book you ever need to read. Maybe.

High 5: Main Ideas and Key Points

1. First and foremost, you need to understand yourself. And the most effective way to do that is to take 100% responsibility for everything in your life. You need to focus on the things that you can control, then go to work on them. Stop reacting and start acting.
2. Most people don’t get to where they want to go because they don’t know where they want to go. Figure out, clearly, where you want to go, what you want to be, and what you want your life to be.
3. So many people complain about not having enough time. It’s not for lack of time. It’s because they don’t know how to prioritize their time and schedule their most important tasks and activities. And most importantly, stop allowing distractions.
4. People come first.
5. You must operate from a set of fundamental principles and values that guide your life and decisions. And you need a Mission Statement so you never forget.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary in 4 Sentences

1. Stephen Covey takes you on a fundamental and practical journey from working on the lens through which you view the world, to how the “correct” lens can guide you, and how to integrate your new paradigm with reality and the world at large.
2. The book focuses on getting you to focus on what is important in your life: your values, principles, mission, roles, relationships, and leadership.
3. The habits are not so much habits in the more modern sense we see today but more a guide to live a well-rounded and meaningful life (Re: The Morning Routine to change your life and a Nighttime Routine).
4. The book is broken down into seven core habits that build upon each other and Covey outlines approaching self-improvement from four main areas: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary Top 3 Quotes

1. “But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”
2. “You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.”
3. “To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”
4. Bonus: “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.”

2 Ways 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Will Change You

1. You will start to guide your decisions and life through a lens of fundamental principles and overarching values.
2. You will learn to prioritize your time and your life.

1 Thing To Implement After Reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

1. Make a “Values List” and Mission Statement, immediately.

The Rating Explained

• I am going to limit the Life-Changing: Must-Read Rating to the best of the best, obviously. The old me would have been throwing it around all willy-nilly. However, I realize the importance now of being extremely strict on the book ratings and the influence it might have on people’s choices as to what to read. I’ve mentioned this before, but I noticed that many people who read just a few books, let’s say 50, rave about them. Of course, they do. Their sample size is limited, they are already biased by simply choosing the book (most likely based on other recommendations) and therefore must rationalize time spent on reading the book, and recency bias. I’ve even noticed it myself: every book that I was currently reading or just read was the best book ever. At the time.
• But books like this are different. This one changes you. It sticks with you long after you’ve finished the final page. Even as I write this summary, I’ve decided to introduce another category I call the “Stickiness Factor”, which rates how long a book will “stick in your mind” after you’ve finished it (assuming you implement what you’ve learned, of course). In fact, I’m starting to realize that even though I recall a lot of what I read, mainly because I create these summaries as well as create videos about the books, the “Stickiness Factor” is the most important element. I mean, what good is a book if it doesn’t really move you, change you, stick with you?
• If you do what this book tells you to do, you will change your life.

Who Should Read It?

• EVERYONE. Seriously, for anyone who wants to change their life, this is the perfect place to start.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary, Review and Notes

My summaries are organized by common ideas and threads not by chapter. I have found this to greatly benefit understanding and recall. They also include the essential lessons and key passages from the book. My Summary, Quotes, Notes, and Thoughts follow:

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau

The 7 Habits

1. Habit 1: Be Proactive (You are the Creator); Habit 1: Freedom to chose
2. Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind (The first Creation); Habit 2: the nature of the choice
3. Habit 3: Put First Things First; Habit 3: the action based on that choice
4. Habit 4: Think Win/Win; Habit 4: respect
5. Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood; Habit 5: understanding
6. Habit 6: Synergize; Habit 6: creative cooperation
7. Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw”; Habit 7: renew 1-6

The Paradigm: Principles

• Our Paradigm is the way we see the world: the lens by which we see the world.
• The way things are vs reality, and the way things should be: values.
• The fastest way to a paradigm shift is a new role.
• Subjective reality or just paradigms that emerge from your experience are not the real territory. The real territory is objective reality which is governed by natural principles like Fairness, Integrity, Honesty, Human Dignity, Service, Contribution, Quality, and Excellence.
• “Principles are the territories; values are the maps.”
• A key lesson in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary is to Start with the inside of yourself: your paradigms, character, assumptions, and motives, and align your paradigm with your principles. Focus on your sense of identity, integrity, control, and directedness.
• Humility: we are not in control. Principles are in control. Submit ourselves to principles.
• “A center of correct principles and a focus on our personal mission empowers us with wisdom to make those judgments effectively.”
• “Integrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles.”
• “If you’re going to bow, bow low,” says Eastern wisdom.

Personality vs Character Traits

• Personality traits are attitudes, behaviors, skills, and techniques.
• Public Image is a positive mental attitude.
• “What we really need are Character traits: Integrity, Humility, Fidelity, Temperance, Courage, Justice, Patience, Industry, Simplicity, Modesty, Growth, Love, Contribution and the Golden Rule.”
• “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”
• “As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.”
• “The four basic principles of The Center:

1. Security: strong intense intrinsic worth and identity.
2. Guidance: strong inner Direction.
3. Wisdom: accurate map of reality where parts and principles relate to each other.
4. Power proactive the power to act according to your own values”.

• “Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth, in other words, conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words – in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a Oneness, primarily with self but also with life. Treat everyone by the same set of principles.”

Activities

• Create a Values List.
• Define your Roles.
• Create a Mission Statement.
• The Funeral Exercise: imagine what family and friends would say, community would say, at your funeral.
• “Although Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of “begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.”
• Create a personal mission statement so that you can constantly refer to it. There also needs to be a place for your roles and for both short – and long-term goals.
• “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 focuses 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.”

People

• “There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity. You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself.”
• Human Endowments: Self-awareness, Imagination, Consciousness, Independent Will, Relationships with others.
• Seek first to understand: We all want so desperately to be understood.
• Don’t project my life or autobiography onto others. Listen to understand.
• Satisfied needs don’t motivate.
• No one wins unless everyone wins.
• “All people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.”
• “Good. You see it differently. Help me understand. I want to understand.”
• “You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.”
• “I set up a big blackboard and we wrote down our goals—the key things we wanted to do—and the jobs that flowed out of those goals. Then I asked for volunteers to do the job.”
• “Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.”
• “Understanding the Individual, really seeking to understand another person, is probably one of the most important deposits you can make.”
• “We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit based on our own needs and desires, either now or when we were at a similar age or stage in life. If they don’t interpret our effort as a deposit, our tendency is to take it as a rejection of our well-intentioned effort and to give up.”
• “Treat them all the same by treating them differently.”
• People are very tender, and very sensitive inside.
• “We can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.”
• “When we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity.”
• “Basically, there are three kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human.”

Time & Management

• “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.”
• Management: the way you spend your time as a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities.
• “Plan effectively from a center of sound principles, from a knowledge of your personal mission with a focus on the important as well as the Urgent and within the framework of maintaining a balance between increasing your production and increasing your production capability.”
• The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.
• “Independent Will: our self-discipline, our integrity, and commitment, not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to the correct principles and our own deepest values which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives.”
• Plan weekly.
• Quadrant 2: to understand and center your life on principles; to give clear expression to the purpose and values you want to direct your daily decisions.
• “The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.”
• “The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven’t really internalized Habit 2.”
• “The way you spend your time is a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities.”

The Emotional Bank Account: Trust

• “When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”
• “Focus on the emotional bank account:
  1. Seek first to understand. Try to see the world from their frame of reference.
  2. Show kindness, courtesy, and respect.
  3. Make and keep promises: you can’t talk yourself out of problems you behave yourself into
  4. Always be loyal to the absent (”One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present”).
  5. Set clear expectations of roles and goals.
  6. Apologize: acknowledge when you’re wrong (”A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.”)
  7. Learn to give feedback with “I” messages like “My concern is”, “My feeling was”.
  8. Learn to forgive and forget.”
• “To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to me as the other person is to me.”

Golden Nuggets

• If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control – myself.
• “To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”
• “Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.”
• “Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).”
• “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.”
• “Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important”
• “Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.”
• “Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”
• “There’s no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.”
• “How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.”
• P = production of desired results (Golden egg) PC = production capability (Goose)
• LEARN, COMMIT & DO
• “Returning once more to the computer metaphor, if Habit 1 says “You’re the programmer” and Habit 2 says “Write the program,” then Habit 3 says “Run the program.””
• People are more important than things.
• “We should remember that effective interdependence can only be built on a foundation of true independence. Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus. As we look back and survey the terrain to determine where we’ve been and where we are in relationship to where we’re going, we clearly see that we could not have gotten where we are without coming the way we came. There aren’t any other roads; there aren’t any shortcuts. There’s no way to parachute into this terrain. The landscape ahead is covered with the fragments of broken relationships of people who have tried. They’ve tried to jump into effective relationships without the maturity, the strength of character, to maintain them. But you just can’t do it; you simply have to travel the road. You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself.”

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary Final Lessons

Buy the Book

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Print | Ebook | Audiobook

Other Books by Stephen Covey

• The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (Print | Ebook | Audiobook)
• First Things First (Print | Ebook | Audiobook)

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