The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective People has sold over 25 million copies and is an amazingly impactful book. It’s not the type of thing I usually read, but I’m glad I did. It is practical, insightful, and worth the investment. Here are 25 of my favorite quotes from Stephen Covey’s landmark work:
1.“…if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.” (39)
2.“If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.” (51)
3.“Private victories precede public victories.” (59)
4.“Ironically…as you care less about what others think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with you.” (69)
5.“That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.” –Thomas Paine (70)
6.“Proactive people subordinate feelings to values.” (88)
7.“Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.” (97)
8.“We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.” (105)
9.“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” –Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis (108)
10.“To begin with the end in mind means…to begin each day with [our] values firmly in mind. Then as the vicissitudes, as the challenges come, I can make my decisions based on those values. I can act with integrity. I don’t have to react to the emotion, the circ*mstance. I can be truly proactive, value driven, because my values are clear.” (113)
11.“The enemy of ‘best’ is often ‘good’.” (165)
12.“Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience, and it doesn’t preclude the necessity to train and develop people so that their competency can rise to the level of that trust.” (187)
13.“Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit.” (200)
14.“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.” (205-206)
15.“It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s own heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.” (207)
16.“Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration.” (228)
17.“…cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace.” (242)
18.“We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.” (249)
19.“There are times when transformation requires no outside counsel. Often when people are really given the chance to open up, they unravel their own problems and the solutions become clear to them in the process.” (263)
20.“People want to be understood. And whatever investment of time it takes to do that will bring much greater returns of time as you work from an accurate understanding of the problems and issues and from the high Emotional Bank Account that results when a person feels deeply understood.” (265)
21.“Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity… The essence of synergy is to value the differences.” (286)
22.“The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.” (289)
23.“As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well – a law as inexorable as gravity.” (306)
24.“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (313-314)
25.“Obviously building a character of total integrity and living the life of love and service that creates such unity isn’t easy. It isn’t quick fix. But it’s possible.” (329)
