This story started as a takedown. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a cornerstone of the business self-help canon, a genre given to saccharine platitudes and lampoonable poster slogans, neither of which bodes well for cultural relevance. It was published in 1989, a time so different from now that the big-shouldered businessmen who read it first might as well have been wearing powdered wigs and pantaloons.
Consider what success means
It’s uncomfortable, at a time when we are all publicly wrestling with structural privilege — who enjoys it, and who does not — to encounter a book premised on the idea that a lot of people stand in their own way. From the moment he announces Habit #1: Be Proactive, Covey encourages people to be independent, not to consider themselves hapless victims, and to rise above the challenges in their lives.
Focus on habits 2, 3, and 5
Part of the reason 7 Habits is successful is that it’s not really a business book. Covey clearly intended his work to guide child rearing, relationships, business connections, and spiritual and ethical value propositions. The book grew out of research on morality and behavior he performed while earning an MBA at Harvard, and later, a doctorate in religious education from Brigham Young. In that research, Covey hit philosophical gold with his second, third, and fifth habits. Each is both timeless and tailor-made for the aggravations of our time.
Habit #2, Begin with the End in Mind, begins by having the reader imagine herself at her funeral.
Covey’s solution is Habit #3, Put First Things First. Identify those activities that “would make a tremendous positive difference in your life.” Then set weekly agendas incorporating them so that they actually get done.
And then there’s Habit #5, Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. Covey explains this one through a series of conversations in which people repeatedly misinterpret each other. Those who are good at this habit, Covey says, first learn to truly listen to people — to what they mean, rather than what they think they mean. Then they learn to present their own thoughts in a way that the other person, coming from a completely different mindset, might find compelling.
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