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
The ability to manage well doesn’t make much difference if you’re not even in the right jungle.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Management
An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Opportunity, Strength
Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Habit, People, Mind
Personal leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.
—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: Peace, Success, Believe, Principles, Mind, Life, Persona, Values, Attitude, Integrity
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
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
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
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
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: People, Attitude, Act, Persona, Rest, War, Action, Power, Knowledge
Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.
—Stephen Covey
You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically—to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good”.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Self-Control, Decide, Best, Courage, Habit, Good
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
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
You can’t live principals you can’t understand.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Principles
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
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
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: Management, Persona, Heart, People, Habit
While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Action, Consequences
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
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
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, Zen, Heart, Peace, Habit, Rest, Master, Meditation, Mind
The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Spending time wisely
In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Communication
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
Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Love
Trust is the highest form of human motivation.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Trust, Habit
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: Habit, Persona, Life, Effectiveness, Act, Kind
If you’re proactive, you don’t have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Chance, Circumstance
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: Great, Nature, Better, Habit
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, Live, Life, Rich
Most people think of leadership as a position and therefore don’t see themselves as leaders.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Leadership
In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person’s life.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Purpose, Persona, Life, Principles, Leadership
Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Power
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
—Stephen Covey
Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Time
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
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
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
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Effectiveness, Management, Discipline, Leadership
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