Stephen Covey (1932–2012) was an American self-improvement author. His chart-topping The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has sold more than 12 million copies since its 1989 publication and helped spawn a business empire based on the “Seven Habits” premise.
Born into a Mormon family in Provo, Utah, Covey got a bachelor’s degree in business administration at the University of Utah and an MBA at Cambridge. He also served as a Mormon missionary in Nottingham, England. Covey later taught at Brigham Young University, earned a PhD in business and education in 1976, and left academics to start the Covey Leadership Center in 1983.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) became immensely popular, appearing on the New York Times best-seller list for more than five years. The Covey Leadership Center—a spin-off management-training center that focused on the book’s tenets—merged with Franklin Quest in 1997 to form the day-planner publisher Franklin Covey.
Covey wrote a number of other books on related themes, including Principle-Centered Leadership (1991,) First Things First (1994,) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997,) The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (2004,) and The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems (2011.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Stephen Covey
In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Decisions
Almost all of the world-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it; they feel it; they experience it before they actually do it. They begin with the end in mind.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Experience, Mind, Act
In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Communication
Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Security
Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Understanding
Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.
—Stephen Covey
The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Commitment, Act, Integrity, Rest
The key is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Do the important things first – because where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit
Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives. But creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Potential
When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s called “success”. But once you have a new challenge, the old, once-successful response no longer works. That’s why it is called a “failure
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Challenges
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
—Stephen Covey
Trust is the highest form of human motivation.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit, Trust
If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? … Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven’t really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Heart, Desire, Mind, People, Habit, Believe
To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
—Stephen Covey
Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.
—Stephen Covey
Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, “How do you maintain that serenity and peace?” He replied, “I never leave my place of meditation”. He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Great, Meditation, Habit, Heart, Mind, Peace, Master, Zen, Rest
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.
—Stephen Covey
Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Power
Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Commitment, Problem-solving
Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Love
While you can think in terms of efficiency in dealing with time, a principle-centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness in dealing with people.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit, People, Effectiveness, Think
People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Change
I believe that a life of integrity I the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude—that you can psych yourself into peace of mind. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Attitude, Principles, Values, Integrity, Mind, Peace, Believe, Persona, Success, Life
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.
—Stephen Covey
Always be loyal to those who are absent, if you want to retain those who are present.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Character, Purpose
The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Spending time wisely
Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Motivation
It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Problems
A long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Persona, Happy, Habit, Live, Life, Health
People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally “being lived.” They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Freedom
What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life? Quadrant II activities have that kind of impact. Our effectiveness takes quantum leaps when we do them.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Life, Effectiveness, Habit, Act, Kind, Persona
The character ethic, which I believe to be the foundation of success, teaches that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Ethics
Interdependency follows independence.
—Stephen Covey
Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Happiness
The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Relationships
Don’t argue for other people’s weaknesses. Don’t argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it—immediately.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Mistakes
People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-centered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we re genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success adds to…rather than detracts from…our lives.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Abundance
Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: People, Habit, Mind
Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Learn, Habit, Act, Experience, Power, Learning, Thoughts
This represents one of the great tragedies and wastes in life, because so much potential remains untapped — completely undeveloped and unused. Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.
—Stephen Covey
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