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
To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don’t pay the price day in and day out, you’ll never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Talent
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: Act, Learning, Learn, Thoughts, Power, Experience, Habit
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
Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Feelings
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Management, Leadership, Success
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
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: War, Learn, Sin, Think, Progress, Habit
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Purpose, Life
Most people think of leadership as a position and therefore don’t see themselves as leaders.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Leadership
Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.
—Stephen Covey
You can’t live principals you can’t understand.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Principles
We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Accomplishment
The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Spending time wisely
Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Time
Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Challenges
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, Rest, Integrity, Act
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Discipline, Effectiveness, Management, Leadership
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
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: Life, Opportunity, Live, Rich
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
The “Inside-Out” approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Relationships
Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: People, Habit, Mind
Always be loyal to those who are absent, if you want to retain those who are present.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Character, Purpose
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: Think, People, Effectiveness, Habit
It’s easy to say “no!” when there’s a deeper “yes!” burning inside.
—Stephen Covey
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, Nature, Better, Great
Personal leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.
—Stephen Covey
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
The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: General
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
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