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
Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do—learn, commit, and do—and learn, commit, and do again.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Learn, Progress, Sin, Think, Habit, War
Priority is a function of context.
—Stephen Covey
Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren’t important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II…Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit, Heart, People, Persona, Management
To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
—Stephen Covey
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: Kind, Act, Persona, Habit, Life, Effectiveness
While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Action, Consequences
Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Awareness, Conscience, Independence
Always be loyal to those who are absent, if you want to retain those who are present.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Character, Purpose
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
—Stephen Covey
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
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: Persona, Values, Mind, Principles, Integrity, Success, Peace, Life, Believe, Attitude
Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit
I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a “transformer” in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Leadership
Begin with the end in mind is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Create, Mind
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Imagination
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: Health, Persona, Live, Happy, Life, Habit
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: Believe, Desire, Mind, People, Heart, Habit
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
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
To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which “life” is made.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Opportunity, Rich, Live, Life
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
Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Wisdom
Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Love
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Leadership, Discipline, Management, Effectiveness
Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.
—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 personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Attitude, Act, War, Action, People, Persona, Rest, Power, Knowledge
As a principle-centered person you try to stand apart from the emotion of the situation and from other factors that would act on you, and evaluate the options. Looking at the balanced whole—the work needs, the family needs, the other needs that may be involved, and the possible implications of the various alternatives—you’ll try to come up with the best solution taking all factors into consideration. We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Control
Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit, Better, Great, Nature
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
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