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1-Page Summary of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Overview

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is a life-management guide that helps people become more effective and successful in their personal lives, relationships, careers, and everything else they do. This book is especially for those who appear to be outwardly successful but are still searching for contentment inside themselves. The author provides the pathway to achieve exactly that.

Stephen Covey describes habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire. In order to implement habits into your life, you need to take two paradigm shifts. First, you should see the book as a tool for implementing change in your life rather than something that is read once and then put on a shelf. Second, share what you learn with friends and family so that they can also benefit from it.

Covey then devotes sections to each of the 7 Habits of Highly Efficient People. Habit 1 is “Be Proactive.” There are proactive and reactive people. A person who is proactive addresses problems without blame and finds solutions based on his core principles and values. Proactive Focus is positive energy that enlarges the Circle of Influence which comprises those things that people have most control over. Habit 2 is “Begin with the End in Mind,” focusing on where you want to be and what you want to achieve will propel you towards success as you start your journey toward effectiveness. Habit 3 is “Put First Things First,” or creating a mental image of what it would be like if everything were perfect, which can help guide decisions about how one spends their time every day so they can accomplish more goals faster than someone who doesn’t create this picture in their mind first before taking action.. Habit 4 is “Win-Win,” or seeking a win-win solution when dealing with others by being self aware and having integrity through deeply held core principles & values.

Habit 5 is “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.” But you can’t understand anyone else until you know yourself first. Once you do, then you’re ready to be understood by others. Habit 6 is “Synergize.” This means that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts when people work together towards a common goal and achieve more working with each other than they could have done alone. Habit 7 is “Renewal.” You must continually maintain and renew your four dimensions – physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional – in order for them all to stay strong over time.

It’s important to focus on the correct principles and balance our focus between increasing our abilities and doing. This will empower us to live creative, effective, useful, peaceful lives.

Section 0 Summary (Inside Out)

People who are successful often want to be even more successful. However, they may lose the relationships that made them successful in the first place. It can be hard to maintain personal goals and still stay committed to your relationships. Marriages can fail and business partnerships can fall apart when people become too focused on their own success.

To achieve success, we must first understand our paradigms and how to make a paradigm shift. A paradigm is like a map that shows us what the world looks like based on what we believe it should look like. We all have two fundamental maps in our heads: the way things are and the way things could be. Our behaviors and attitudes emanate from these assumptions of how things are or could be. Trying to change without examining these paradigms is impossible because we need to know where they’re coming from if we want them to change at all. Every person thinks he or she is objective but that’s rarely true; by exploring our own paradigms, though, we can become more objective than ever before about ourselves and others around us, which makes it possible for us to make superficial changes as well as deep ones—the latter of which opens up new possibilities not only for ourselves but also for those who come into contact with us.