Live out of your imagination, not your history.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Imagination
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
Look at the word responsibility—“response-ability”—the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: People, Blame, Values, Habit, Choice, Act, Responsibility
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
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Life, Purpose
We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Busy, Beginning, Goals, Create, Mind
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
You can’t live principals you can’t understand.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Principles
Accountability breeds response-ability.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: One liners, Responsibility
The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: General
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
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
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
Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Entrepreneurs
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
To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
—Stephen Covey
It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Character
The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Focus, Character, Mind, Values, Act, Persona, Doing, Achievement, Principles, Habit, Achieve
Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Freedom, Power
Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Power
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
Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Character, Fortune
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
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: Mind, Act, Experience
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
In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Communication
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
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
Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Mind, Habit, People
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Tom Peters American Management Consultant
- Orson Scott Card American Author
- Peter Senge American Management Consultant
- Robin Sharma Canadian Writer, Motivational Speaker
- Margaret J. Wheatley American Management Consultant
- Peter Drucker Austrian-born Management Consultant
- Thomas S. Monson American Mormon Religious Leader
- Gordon B. Hinckley American Mormon Religious Leader
- Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
- Marvin J. Ashton American Mormon Religious Leader
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