The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was perhaps the personal development book of the 1990s and is still the book many people think of when they hear the phrase “personal development book.” I first picked up the book myself in high school when serving as a district officer in a large youth organization (the FFA, if you must know) – our advisor gave each officer a copy of the book to keep, but after reading it, I passed it on to others because it didn’t make much of an impact on me at the time.
What do I get out of reading it now as an adult more than ten years later? I will say that my opinion of the book has improved – maturity has shown me that some things I thought to be trite and obvious in my youth were truly neither trite nor obvious, but actually powerful challenges in life. Let’s step through the seven habits to see what I’m talking about.
A Stroll Through The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The entire premise of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is that most people deal with the problems in their life in a scattershot fashion, and this scattershot fashion leads to disillusionment and disorder. Covey’s answer to this is that to be a truly effective person, you need to learn to solve personal and professional problems with a integrated and principle-centered approach – in other words, the decisions you make both personally and professionally should come from the same core set of values and ideas.
The book is really about developing that core set of values to the point where it’s easy to draw solutions to problems from them, making you a much more effective person in all aspects of life. The seven habits, thus, are ways to draw out the fundamental truths in your life and make them accessible to you at all times, so that when you’re faced with problems, you can easily solve them in a consistent and sensible fashion.
Habit 1: Be Proactive
Principles of Personal Vision
Habit 2: Begin With The End In Mind
Principles of Personal Leadership
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Principles of Personal Management
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Principles of Interpersonal Leadership
Habit 5: Seek First To Understand, Then Be Understood
Principles of Empathic Communication
Habit 6: Synergize
Principles of Creative Cooperation
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal