The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Key Insights

The seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen R. Covey emphasize proactive living, personal leadership, prioritizing, empathy, synergy, and continual self-improvement.

### "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey
* 🧠 Understand paradigms, which are different perspectives of reality shaped by **conditioning, background, and environment**.
* 🪜 Paradigm shifts occur when **traditional thought patterns are broken**.
* 🧠 The 7 habits are guiding principles, not tactics, that **take time to implement**.
* 🧘 Progress through the maturity continuum from **dependent** to **independent** to **interdependent**.
* 💼 Think win-win by developing an **abundance mindset** and valuing **emotional bank accounts**.
* 👂 Seek first to understand, then to be understood by **empathetically listening to others**.
* 💡 Synergize by **valuing differences**, **understanding others' paradigms**, and **creating third alternative solutions**.
* 🪚 Sharpen the saw by continually improving **physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of life**.

The seven habits of highly affected people by Stephen R. Covey. Now guys, I'm super excited to be bringing this video to you today because we're gonna be doing a detailed breakdown of everything within the book. And by the end of this video, you're gonna have a super clear understanding of how you can use these seven habits to improve your life. Not only is it one of my favorite books of all time, but it is widely considered one of the greatest self-help books of all time. Let's jump into it. All right, so the seven habits of highly effective people. I want to say this book was recommended to me maybe 10 years ago. I ended up reading it, I would say maybe five years ago, and then due to this whole coronavirus business, we're all currently going through, I had a bit of extra time. So I was able to pull it back down off the shelf and have a reread of it. What I did differently this time around was that I actually took detailed notes and I wrote down all the

insights that I got from the book. And that's what I'm going to be sharing with you guys today. And this is one of those books that. As you progress through your life, you're going to want to come back to it again and again. So I'm sure in a few years, I I will come back to this book again. Just to refresh my mind with all these habits and make sure that I am actually implementing them into my life. So let's jump into it, guys. What you will notice when you first get into the book is that. It starts off before it gets into the seven habits. It has a section called paradigms and principles. And so he goes into these concepts. And so what is a paradigm? A paradigm is basically. How someone perceives reality, and the author goes into. Quite a bit of detail explaining why it's so important to understand that. Everybody has a different paradigm, and the way that they perceive reality could be. Very different to your own. So it's. It's very important to understand that difference.

These paradigms are built around your conditioning, your background, your environment, how you were brought up, things like this. He also talks about paradigm shifts, okay, and he gives an example here about a man sitting on a train. And there are some children running around the train, being very loud, quite obnoxious, you know, swinging around the poles and whatnot, and disturbing everybody on the train. And this man is sitting next to the father of these children, and the man is thinking to himself like, is this guy going to do anything or is he just going to sit there and just not do anything about this, you know, this guy must be like a really irresponsible parent. So anyway, he lets it go on for a few more minutes, and then finally he has enough and he just says, um, excuse me, sir. Would you mind looking after your children? They're really disturbing the rest of the train. And at that moment, this other man slowly lifts his head and says, oh yes, yes, I'm sorry, sir.

Um, yeah, I guess I'll do that. I'm very sorry about that. I've just come from the hospital, and my mother passed away around an hour ago. So, in that moment, this man's paradigm was completely shifted because you know for that 10 minutes while he was sitting there in his perception of reality. He was thinking, you know, this guy is an irresponsible parent who obviously lacks social skills. And you know, in that instant, his paradigm was completely shifted, and the way he thought about this man was completely different. So, a paradigm shift is basically any time when your thought pattern or the way that you perceive reality breaks away from traditional thought. He also says in the book that the quickest way to change someone's behavior is to change their paradigm. He then goes on to talk about this concept of principles thinking. So, throughout this book, you can think of these seven habits as principles. So, this book is really not tactics and tricks that you can use, but it is guiding principles. One thing you will notice, and I noticed this when I was first going through the book

A lot of these habits just kind of seem very simple and kind of like common sense, but You know, as we all know, Simple doesn't always mean easy. So yes, these habits are simple, but they do take time to implement into your life and Embed into your psyche. That's why, as I mentioned earlier, This is a book that you can pick up year after year after year and re-read it. Because the principles never change whereas tactics do change. Another common theme throughout the book is this this line of maturity or in the book it refers to it as the Uh maturity continuum. So as you can see, there's like three phases of maturity and The first phase is the dependent phase. Okay, so this is all about I so, uh, sorry all about you so You depend on other people you have to do this for me. Okay? Why didn't you do this for me? Okay, so think of like a child when you're growing up, you're fully dependent on your parents.

And the people around you. The next phase up is independent. Okay, so this is about I can achieve this on my own. I don't need to rely on other people. And the last phase is ultimately what you want to achieve and what this book preaches, which is this Interdependent phase. So this is all about we, so Making relationships with people whether it's a marriage, family, you know the management team at your business. This is about getting really good at making synergistic relationships with people. This line of maturity pops up throughout the book, and we'll come back to it a few times throughout this video. The last main theme That pops up throughout the book is this concept of emotional bank accounts, and I really like this concept from the book. So Basically, he gets you to imagine that everybody you have a relationship with and everybody that you meet have these, you know, imaginary emotional bank accounts within them, okay, and these bank accounts you can put you can deposit into or you can take withdrawals from.

There's a heap of examples in the book, but I'll just go through some of the ones that I found here. So, one way that you could make a deposit into someone's emotional bank account is just simple things like small acts of kindness. Okay, so saying thank you, saying please, small acts of courtesy, things like this. Obviously, a withdrawal would be the opposite of that. So, being rude to someone, using derogatory language towards someone. Next one, the golden rule: Don't do unto others what you don't want done to yourself. Okay, I think we all understand this golden rule. Um, next, he says to apologize first, even if you don't think that you're in the wrong, so this takes courage. Obviously, people that have an ego or they're prideful, they never want to be the one to apologize first. So, he encourages you if you want to make deposits into people's bank accounts, be that one to have the courage to apologize first. The next point, and I really like this point, this was to make sure that you clarify expectations with everybody that you meet.

So whether that's in business or in romantic relationships, make sure that from the get-go you're clarifying those expectations with the other person in the relationship. You need to know who owns the role and what's the goal. So what are you both hoping to achieve and who does what? The next one here was keeping commitments. If you tell someone you're going to do something, commit to that. That's making deposits into people's bank accounts, emotional bank accounts. Withdrawals, always canceling on people, saying that you're going to be there. People expect you to be there and then you hey, Sorry, man. I can't come. Okay, that's withdrawing from their emotional bank accounts. The next one was don't gossip and talk behind the backs of others. I mean, we all probably know people that do this. We may do this ourselves. Okay, I know in the past I was probably guilty of this. However, I now for myself, I have a no gossip policy, which I've had for many, many years now. And I got that from this book as well as other books to simply not gossip about others.

Because I mean if I don't know about you guys, but for myself, if I meet someone that's gossiping about people behind their back, my immediate thought is that okay. This person is probably doing the same about me when I'm not in the room, so that's a definite withdrawal gossiping. And the last one, which I found was very useful, and I would like to implement into my life going forward, was this concept of give effective feedback. And he talks about i-messages versus you messages. I'll just read some here. So, for example, an i-message would be, I've been having a problem recently, and I feel somewhat neglected, versus a you message, You really are a selfish person. You have a real problem. Okay, now can you see the difference? They're both touching on the same topic, the same subject. However, you can feel the difference between the way that they're delivered. When you use you messages, you messages are something that really labels someone. Okay, you're labeling them, and that is just something that people

don't react well to okay. So obviously, this would take practice, but if you can deliver your feedback by using iMessages instead of you messages and not labeling people, that is another way to deposit into those emotional bank accounts. All right, so let's jump into the first of the seven habits, and the first habit is to be proactive. At the beginning of this chapter, it starts with a quote which says, I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. Henry David Thoreau. I love these two last words, conscious endeavor, and that's basically what we're going to go into in more detail here. The first thing you need to understand is that your life is a product of your values and choices, and not your feelings and conditions. Well, at least it can be if you choose to make it that way. So the first thing to take away from this first habit is that you are the creative force of your own life.

so Another way to put that is that you are the one in the driver's seat. In the book, it gives the metaphor of you being the computer programmer that is going to create the program for your life. And he says that the best way to predict your future is to create it. The way in which you do that is by being a proactive person. So the opposite of that would be a reactive person. And a reactive person is someone that's really a slave to their impulses, a slave to their feelings and their emotions. And this is what we don't want to be, someone that lets the conditions of our life control our life. The next insight here is to take full responsibility for everything that happens in your life. So you need to separate yourself away from all these external influences on your life and separate yourself from your past, everything that's happened to you. We all know these people that blame their past conditions why they can't perform in the present. And it's not in this book, but I really love this quote by Tony Robbins, and I thought it would

match this be proactive theme, which is Don't let life happen to you, but let life happen for you. Okay, and it really hammers home that be proactive mindset, so you need to be a hundred percent responsible for where you are at now in your life and don't be one of these people that plays the blame game. The next insight is that your greatest power is your power to choose. Basically, the power to choose is how you respond to any condition that is thrown your way. One of my favorite books of all time, and he also mentions this in this book The Seven Habits, is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankel. And I hope to do a summary of that book in the not too distant future as well. Because yeah, as I said, it's one of my probably is actually my favorite book of all time. That book really hammers home this point that your power to choose your attitude on a daily basis is an amazing thing. Another core concept that it goes into within this first habit of be proactive is this.

Uh concept of stimulus and response. So how you respond to? Stimulus that is thrown your way. And he talks about uh between stimulus and response is this space where? Our greatest power lies and that is your freedom to choose. And this is what truly makes us uniquely human. If we're to look at animals, they. They operate completely on just a stimulus and response loop. So it's all just instinct and training whereas as humans, we have the ability to imagine, we have self-awareness. We are aware of our consciousness. So we have this ability, this space in between and that's that freedom to choose. Your attitude. So you really don't want to go through life as a reactive person, which you know doesn't take advantage of this. This freedom to choose and manifest reality. The last insight from this first habit is. This concept of the circle of influence and concern. So. Everyone has external influences and internal influences. If you see here on this outer circle, we have the circle of concern. And these are things that are just completely outside of your control. So things like the weather, politics.

other people's weaknesses, economics, superior forces, pandemics, etc. Now these things we need to. We need to learn to accept these things as they are and just get on with our lives. If we look at this inner circle. This is the circle of influence, and these are things that you can focus on on a daily basis. Okay, you can focus on these things and expand your sphere of influence. These are things like your mood, your personal health, your habits, choice of work, people you choose to be around, your work-life balance, things like this. Okay. So this is where you want to focus your energy. So when you wake up in the morning. These are definitely the things that you want to be focusing on. If you're the kind of person that wakes up and first thing you do is uh check your Twitter and respond to the latest rant from someone else. And then you check the news and you get angry at what a politician said. These are things that uh you know in your circle of concern and you just want to try and eliminate as much of these.

Influences out of your life so that you can focus on the things that you do have the ability to focus on and change. All right, so let's jump into the second habit, which is to begin with the end in mind. So if you remember back to habit one, we spoke about that metaphor of you being the programmer, the computer programmer of your life, okay? So if that is what habit one is, then habit two is you need to write the program. And when I was thinking about this in my mind, I kind of said to myself, Don't live someone else's program, write your own program. And basically, this habit is all about taking personal leadership over your life. And I mean the opposite of taking personal leadership would be to, you know, have no focus, have no objective, just go through life, just going with the flow and letting life happen to you. And the sad thing is that most people just go through life, uh, you know, going with the flow, and what's actually happening is that they're living their life by someone else's program.

And not their own program. In this chapter, he had a quote, which I really liked, which was don't have your ladder leaning against the wrong wall. So, one of the first things in this habit is he kind of walks you through this funeral thought experiment. You kind of need to imagine that you've just died, and they're having a funeral for you. And people are coming into the funeral hall. Your body is laying there in the casket. And someone gets up to read your eulogy. And you need to think about what is this person going to say about you? Okay. What type of person were you? What was your character? What goals did you accomplish throughout your life? What were the principles that you lived your life by? And I've found that when you actually do take a few minutes to go through this thought experiment, it does put things into a different perspective when you need to think about things from a different angle. So, from the angle of after you're gone, the next key insight that I got from this was that all things are created twice.

You need to remember that even with something like a car or a house, it's always created first in someone's thoughts. And then created twice in physical reality. So it's important to remember just how powerful your thoughts are because everything initially resides in the mind, and then it's recreated in the physical universe. So don't underestimate the power of your thoughts. This habit also goes into a lot of detail about writing your own personal mission statement, and this is kind of a document for your life, kind of your guiding principles, your values. If we go back, it's kind of like thinking about a program. What are the key principles that this program runs on? What would you like to be like? What do you want to achieve, and what are your values and principles? And that's the most important part, your values and your principles. So he also mentions that this is not something that you just sit down and quickly invent. This is something that can take weeks, even months to come up with and perfect. And actually, perfect is not the right word because you will never perfect it. This is something that's

A evolving document. So it's something that will continue to evolve as you evolve yourself. So the key main takeaway from this habit is that You need to write the program, don't live someone else's program, or as he puts. It don't have your ladder leaning against the wrong wall. Now habit three put first things first. This habit starts off with this quote which says things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least by Goethe. Now if we stick with that metaphor of the computer programmer. Like we said in habit one, you are the programmer, in habit two. You need to write that program. Then we come to this habit, habit three, which can be thought of as running the program. Okay, so running the program. And basically this program is run or organized around everything that you came up with in habit two. So your values and your principles, okay. And it is in this habit where you develop your discipline and commitment. The first thing that I took away from this habit

Was that you need to think about all your roles in life? So you may have many different roles. You might be, you know, a boyfriend, a husband. Uh, you might be a father as well. You might also be a manager or an owner of a company. So you need to think. About every role that relates to yourself. Okay, what are your roles in life? And then from those roles, you want to extrapolate out your goals. And then for each goal, for each role, you want to have. Plans to Meet those goals. Okay, so it's really kind of systematizing. Your roles in life so that you achieve each goal for those roles. Now throughout this habit, he also presses heavily. About this, uh, these four quadrants that he talks about. So. These top two quadrants, okay, these top two quadrants. This is where you want to be spending most of your life. However, he explains that most people. Spend their life in these two lower quadrants. Okay, just doing things that are not important, not urgent.

things that are just not going to help you get to what you wrote in your personal mission statement up here. Okay. Again, these things look simple, right, but obviously they're not that easy. You need to work at them. And it's just good to use this to kind of put you in a frame of mind when you're thinking about things that should or shouldn't get done. Okay. So this top left quadrant. This is where things that are urgent and important. And this is the quadrant that you want to keep. Keep this box empty. Okay. Keep this quadrant empty as often as you can. Um, up here things that are important but not urgent. Okay. So these are things that most people just put on the back burner. Okay, so things like your relationship goals, improving yourself, your personal development. Okay, that's where these things reside. Okay. If we look down here to this fourth quadrant. This is a trap for most people. Okay. This is like Netflix, going out to the bar.

things that you just need to say no to. Things that are just really not important if you really want to achieve your goals in life. The other key insight that I got from this habit was that you need to be effective with people and be efficient with things. But never try to be efficient with people, okay? He says, Fast is slow and slow is fast with people, okay? So never try to never try to systematize or be efficient with your relationships. Okay, you can do that with things going on in your life, but not with people and relationships. So if we come back to our line of maturity here that we spoke about earlier. So we've just covered these first three habits. First one being proactive, begin with the end in mind, and the third habit, put first things first. Okay. So these three habits are what he refers to as the private victory. And once you've solidified these habits, that's when you grow out of this dependency phase up into this independent phase. Okay, let's jump into the fourth habit now.

And the fourth habit is to think win-win. And some key insights here, the most important one that I found, was that you need to develop this abundance mindset in order to be in the right frame of mind for thinking about win-win situations. You really need to be in this abundance mindset. So the opposite, obviously, of abundance would be a scarcity mindset. So if we look at somebody that is scarcity-minded, you know, they tend to compete, they will hoard information. Uh, they tend to think that people are maybe trying to steal something from them. You know, the pie is getting smaller, they fear change, and they avoid risk. Whereas if we look at someone with an abundance mindset, they tend to be more generous. They will collaborate. There's plenty to go around. So the pie is always getting bigger. There's enough for everybody. Uh, they take ownership of change and they embrace risk. So you want to be a person that is abundance-minded as opposed to scarcity-minded. The next insight is that most people don't even think that a win-win situation is possible because they tend to think in

Dichotomies. Okay. So strong versus weak, hot versus cold, win versus lose. What you first of all need to do is think that yes, a win-win is possible, but second, the more difficult thing is that you need to have real discipline with yourself to not settle for anything less than win-win. So the other insight was that you shouldn't compromise. It should be win-win or no deal. You need to walk away from the table if there is not a win-win situation, and that is much harder to do than a win-lose situation. And finally, you should always be thinking about these emotional bank accounts that we spoke about earlier. So before you get into any kind of negotiation, if it's in business or a relationship, you should always be building up that emotional bank account first before jumping into any negotiation because that's going to make this win-win much easier. Habit five, seek first to understand, then to be understood. So most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or

preparing to speak. The most important uh thing to understand is the sequence of these two expressions. So, seek first to understand, and then to be understood. So, don't listen with the intent to reply. You don't want to force or coerce, you know, manipulate, persuade people into why your opinion is better than theirs. What you want to be doing is asking the right questions so that you can better enable yourself to put yourself in their shoes and better understand what it is they want and what their paradigm is. You know, we all live in it is a subjective world, and we all live in our own little subjective worlds. And every now and then, our worlds will collide with one another. And when we try to interact with each other in these little subjective worlds, uh, what we do is we try to interact in an efficient manner. So, we're always just thinking about how we can be understood efficiently and have our point of view understood. But if you remember to what we said before, we want to be effective with people and efficient with things.

And not the other way around. So, unless you first seek to understand that person's world, you will not have any influence over that person. And in turn, they will not have any influence over you. So just if we look at this little diagram here, this is at the top in the red how most people interact with others. So they listen, but actually what they're doing is they're thinking in their mind of what they're going to say next, okay, and then they seek to be understood. So what this book goes into is explaining this step of that empathetic listening and understanding. Really understanding what they're getting at before you reply. And then you can seek to be understood, okay, we're going to go into this in a little bit more detail in the next habit, but hopefully that outlined what this means here, seek first to understand and then to be understood. And the sixth habit is synergize. So how does synergy work? I heard a great story which highlights this concept of synergy. So I'm going to go through that story first, and then after that, I'll get into the insights that I got from this habit.

So there's two guys working in an office. This guy always wants the window open, and this guy always wants the window closed. So every day this guy walks in and he opens the windows, and when the other guy walks in, he closes the windows. 10 minutes later, one of the guys stands up and opens the windows. You can see where I'm going with this. So basically, this just turns into a big ego trip, and both of the men are just trying to get their own way each day. Now, if you're looking at this from the outside, you're probably thinking there really is only two options: either the window is open or the window is closed. And you could also come from it from a compromised position. Whereby it's only open half the time or it's only open halfway. However, if you recall from habits 4 and five, we don't want to make a compromise. A compromise is not what we are looking for. So what can we do next? Well, if we look at habit five, we need to seek first to understand and then to be understood.

So what this man can do is use habit 4 and think about win-win situations. So I can see that we're approaching this situation differently. Why don't we agree to communicate until we can find a solution we both feel good about. Would you be willing to do that? No. You know, most people would be willing to do that. Of course, you wouldn't have to word it exactly like this, as formal as this, but you get the understanding and then you might go into habit habit five. So, all right. Let me listen to you first, and this is where you seek to understand them. So in this situation, he does that. He comes and asks the guy. The guy says, Look, um, you know, I feel a bit claustrophobic if the window's not open. The air's stuffy in here. And I just can't get my work done. I feel claustrophobic in here. I need to see like the outside world or feel the outside world. Okay. Oh, okay, and then

This person asks the other man, Oh, why do you want the window closed all the time? And he says, Well, I have a lot of uh papers on my desk that need to be all in order, and every time that you, every time the window is open, my papers keep flying everywhere. The breeze is blowing them around. So in this situation, it's much easier to find these alternative solutions to what they could do, right? So, you know, maybe uh the man could move his desk so that the breeze isn't affecting him. Or they could set it up in a way so that they put up a screen or something whereby the breeze won't be disrupting his papers. And only when they actually understand each other are they able to come up with these third, you know, alternative solutions. This habit here is where it really ties together habit habits four, five, and six. These ones really work together with each other. Okay, so it says here for Habit six is where you really understand their paradigm, really understand what it is that they want.

And it says here we work together to produce third alternative solutions. To our differences that we both recognize are better than the ones either you or I proposed initially. And when you're coming up with these third alternative solutions, it's very important to go back to those emotional bank accounts that we spoke about earlier. If you've been, you know, investing into these emotional bank accounts, making lots of deposits, then these third alternative solutions, these win-win solutions, they're going to be much easier to negotiate, okay, much easier. Okay, and the last insight that I got from this habit was to value the difference. Effective people understand their own perceptual limitations and learn how to benefit from diversity. Okay. So I want you to look at this picture. You may have seen it before already. But if you haven't, look at this picture and just think about what you see. What can you see in this picture? Now, fifty percent of you or thereabouts will see a young woman. Okay, rather pretty, uh, young woman staring off to the side.

The other fifty percent of you will see an old woman, okay, with a big nose, and mouth, and chin down the bottom here. Now, if I was to ask you who was right or wrong in this case, would there be a right and wrong? Okay, and the answer is no, so you can both be right. It's just, it just comes down to how you perceive the picture. Okay, so think about how you could apply this concept to your life. Think about things that you may be missing within your perception of reality. And that's what it refers to here as your perceptual limitations. You need to learn how to benefit from diversity. So only when you open up to other people's perceptions of reality, only then are you able to better understand the world and see the things that you're limited by and see the things that you are missing. This is why it's so important to be developing these synergistic relationships. Anytime that you have a disagreement with someone, try to value the difference, try to understand them, and see if there's ways that you can use that difference to come up with better third alternative solutions.

And lastly, these synergistic relationships. Okay, one plus one does not equal two in these synergistic relationships. One plus one is greater than two. It could be fifty, hundred, thousand. It could be exponential. So, if we just quickly come back here to our maturity continuum. So, we've just gone through habits four, five, and six here. And this is what the author refers to as the public victory, okay? And once you master these three habits, that's when you're ready for this phase of maturity, which is interdependency. Now, let's jump into this habit, which is the last habit, sharpening the saw. So, habit 7, sharpen the saw. The material in this book is designed to be a companion in the continual process of change and growth. So, this habit is basically all about just making sure that you are always continuing to improve upon the habits and improve upon yourself. And he says that there are four main types of renewal. Okay, you have physical renewal, mental renewal, emotional and social renewal, and spiritual renewal. So, for myself, physical renewal is things like going to the gym on a regular basis, making sure that I get exercise.

I have the right nutrition. Mental renewal is for myself things like reading books. You know, listening to maybe TED talks, making sure that I'm always improving, and always stimulating my mind. The next is Emotional and social. So that's things like your relationships. Okay, trying to deepen and grow your relationships on a continual basis. And lastly, for spiritual renewal, there's different things you can do. But for myself, I like to meditate in the mornings. I also like to do things like, uh, Tony Robbins priming on the other occasion, which I find helpful. You can think of this last habit as Like personal kaizen. So if you're familiar with that Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which is the continual improvement upon something. All right, let's do a super quick summary recap of everything we just went through in the video. So understand this first concept of paradigms. We all have different paradigms. Try to understand that we all perceive reality differently. Principles be a principles thinker. Don't think in tactics. Think about principles that will guide your life.

Always be trying to put deposits into people's Emotional bank accounts. Be wary of making too many withdrawals from their bank accounts. Be a proactive person, don't be a reactive person. You are the computer programmer, you need to write the program and don't live by someone else's program. Next, you want to be limiting the things that influence your circle of concern. Things outside of your control. What you want to be focusing on are the things within your circle of influence. Write yourself a personal mission statement. This document will outline your values and your principles and be a guiding document for your life. Don't put the things that matter most at the mercy of the things which matter least. You want to be living in these top two quadrants. Don't make the mistake of what most people do and live in these bottom two quadrants. Know your roles. Know the goals that you want to achieve for those roles and plan to hit those goals. Reverse engineer your life and systematize these roles. Next, we live in a subjective world. Make sure that you're seeking to understand first before you're understood.

Value the difference. Understand that in synergistic relationships, one plus one does not equal two. And lastly, sharpening the saw, make sure you're always continually improving your life through physical, mental, social, and spiritual means. Okay, I hope you guys got some great insights from this book. Uh, I am gonna be making summaries just like this one going forward in the future. So if you enjoyed this style, please subscribe to the channel. That would really help me out, and if there are any books that you would like me to read and do a summary of, you can reach out to me and let me know. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good day.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Detailed Summary)

Visual Summaries of the Best Books and Ideas :)

I like to bring great books and ideas to life in a visual way.  I love reading and listening to books, so I want to share with others books and Authors I recommend.

My mission for this channel is to get people (especially younger folk)  enthusiastic about picking up books more often and  mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, IG etc. less often. 

FAQ
What do you use to make the videos?

I use everything Adobe, but the main programs I use are
-Illustrator
-After Effects
-Audition
-Premier Pro
-Photoshop (but not often) 

Why are you so slow with your content?

Everything you see in the video was put together by myself, and they take a longggg time, from reading the book, doing voiceovers, making illustrations, editing etc. I currently have a FT job, but I hope in the future I can go PT and create content more often :) 






Escaping Ordinary (B.C Marx) 

Understanding "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R.

The book emphasizes the importance of paradigms and principles in understanding the seven habits.

Covey explains how a paradigm shift can change the way we perceive reality and the quickest way to change behavior.

The book's guiding principles are presented as concepts that may seem simple but require time to implement, emphasizing the importance of re-reading and embedding the principles into one's life.

The concept of maturity continuum, with its three phases, is also a common theme throughout the book, highlighting the progression from dependence to independence.

The book discusses three key phases of maturity: dependent, independent, and interdependent, emphasizing the importance of building strong relationships with others.

The concept of emotional bank accounts is highlighted, focusing on the actions that either deposit or withdraw from these accounts in relationships.

The first habit, "Be Proactive," emphasizes the idea that individuals are in control of their own lives through their values and choices, rather than their feelings and conditions.

Taking Control of Your Life: The Power of Being Proactive

The key to shaping your future is to be proactive, taking full responsibility for your life and avoiding a reactive mindset.

Your greatest power lies in your ability to choose your response to any situation, giving you the freedom to manifest your reality.

Focus your energy on your circle of influence, rather than wasting it on things beyond your control, to effectively take charge of your life.

Taking Control of Your Life: The Power of Proactive Habits

Starting with the end in mind means taking personal leadership and not living by someone else's program.

It's about creating a personal mission statement based on your guiding principles and values, which evolves as you evolve.

"Put first things first" is about running the program of your life based on the values and principles you've established, developing discipline and commitment to what matters most.

Managing Your Roles in Life and Achieving Success

It's important to identify and prioritize your various roles in life, such as being a partner, parent, or professional.

Setting goals for each role and creating plans to achieve them is crucial for success.

Stephen Covey's four quadrants of time management emphasize focusing on important tasks and avoiding time-wasting activities to increase effectiveness.

Mastering Win-Win Negotiations and Synergy

A win-win situation requires discipline and the willingness to walk away from a deal that doesn't benefit both parties.

Building an emotional bank account with the other party is crucial before entering negotiations.

The key is to seek first to understand the other person's perspective before trying to be understood, and to avoid the trap of seeking compromise.

Using habit 4, the person seeks a win-win solution through communication and understanding.

Habit 5 involves actively listening to the other person's perspective to find common ground.

Habit 6 emphasizes the importance of working together to find third alternative solutions that benefit both parties, while also valuing their differences and benefiting from diverse perceptions.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: A Summary

The author emphasizes the concept of interdependency as the pinnacle of maturity, following the mastery of habits four to six.

Habit 7, "sharpen the saw," focuses on continuous self-improvement through physical, mental, social, and spiritual renewal.

The book promotes principles over tactics, proactive behavior, and prioritizing important matters to achieve effectiveness.