PNTV: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (#12)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we're going to do classic book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. As always, great book, Philosopher's Notes. We've got about 10 of my favorite big ideas here in this PDF. We've got a workbook with all 100 of these PDFs, but we can talk about the seven habits of highly effective people for roughly a year and get through all the big ideas in it. We've got 10 minutes, so we will jump in. I will say that this was one of the first books. It was actually probably the first self development book I read way back in probably 1995 that totally inspired me to realize that I can develop my character and transform my life. And deeply inspiring for me. So I'm excited to do this note and, and to share some of my favorite big ideas. Really quickly. We'll go through the seven habits themselves and then I'll go into detail on a few of my favorite ones. So habit number one is to be proactive rather than reactive. Habit number two is to begin with the end in mind. Habit number three is to put first things first. Habit number four is to think. Win, win. Habit number five is to seek first to understand, then to be understood. Habit number six is synergy. And habit number seven is to sharpen the saw. Those are the seven habits of highly effective people. And Stephen Covey is all about character development. He talks about in the book the fact that private victory precedes public victory. First we must master ourselves, then we can experience success in the outside world. Too often people look for the get rich quick stuff or, or the success principles that will catapult us into success. And he says, no, no, no, no. You've got to start with character development. You've got to start with who you are as a human being. And he looks at the classic wisdom over the last hundreds and thousands of years that we can translate into our lives today. And that's what the seven habits are all about. So habit number one, be proactive. Essentially this means be proactive. Be a creator of your reality, not a reactive victim to life circumstances. Right. He talks about Pavlov's dogs. And if you remember, they were conditioned such that a bell was rung whenever they ate and they learned to salivate every time the stimulus of a sound of the bell was ringing, they would associate that with being fed and they would salivate. Right. They were reactive. They were conditioned. Well, most of us are conditioned the same way someone cuts us off in traffic we respond the same way all the time with anger, with frustration, etc. Well, he says we need to be proactive. We need to be able to step in between stimulus and response and choose our response. And he talks about the fact that a lot of people talk about this and there's a reason why this is habit number one. Everyone talks about the importance of being proactive. He says we need to be responsible, which can be broken down into two words. Response, able. Able to choose our response versus simply reacting to the stimuli that come into our lives. So we want to be proactive. We want to be able to choose our response to any given situation. That's habit number one. Question for you is how in your life are you being reactive? Can you see how you get triggered by life circumstances? And can you step in to between stimulus and response and choose your response, be able to respond appropriately? It's huge. Without that, none of this other stuff really matters because if we're always subject to whatever's going on in our lives and then being a victim and blaming and criticizing, we're in trouble. We need to be proactive. That's habit number one. Habit number two is the idea that we need to begin with the end in mind. He says, and this is echoed throughout the literature that. That everything is created twice. Once in our minds and then once in reality. Again in reality, right? Everything from these philosopher's notes to that book, to this table, it was imagined and then it was created. He says we need to focus on what we want to see created in our lives. If you think about it, most people spend more time. This is a hackneyed story, but most people spend more time planning their vacations than they do planning their lives. And the fact is that if we spent. If those people spent as much time planning their lives, what they're here to do as they do their vacation or the next car they're going to buy or whatever. They probably wouldn't need the vacation so desperately to escape the life they don't love. So we need to spend time imagining our ideal. Psychologists talk about this too. And we went off on it in the positive psychology push in the very beginning of Philosopher's Notes tv, where they call it Best Selves Diary. It's one of the key ways to develop optimism, is to imagine what your ideal is and then step forward into it. Really, really cool stuff. I dig it. And he has a really powerful exercise here too, of imagining the ultimate end. So imagine that you're walking into a funeral and you realize that the funeral is for you, it's the end of your life and. And who's there and what do they have to say about you? What are the eulogies? What do the people closest to you have to say about you after you've passed away? That's the ultimate end in mind. You may not like to imagine other people and all that kind of stuff. Imagine what you would have to say about yourself in that case. But go to the end and then imagine who are you, what do people have to say about you? And then ask yourself, am I living consistent with that ideal now? Am I in integrity on that front? This is an exercise I used to do with my friends and some clients I had. The first exercise I would do was that the funeral exercise. And get a really clear sense on what your deepest values are. And if we say that it's important to us that we're compassionate and creative and giving ourselves to the world, but we wind up spending all of our time on the Internet or watching TV or whatever it is, we need to get an integrity there and find how we can live our values consistently. If we want to be a loving parent or spouse, but we yell every time we come home from work, well, that doesn't work. We've got to take advantage of the opportunity to be inconsistent moment to moment to moment. That's the idea of beginning with the end in mind. Habit number three is putting first things first. This is awesome. He wrote a whole book called that. I'm going to link to a big idea from this note where I can describe it in more detail, but he's got a great four quadrant model. Quadrant two is where we want to spend most of our time and it's where things are important but not urgent. Whereas quadrant one is important and urgent. Like fire drills need to get done. Quadrant three is what is it? It's urgent but not important. Right? Things that never need to get done, but they need to get done now. Never a good place to spend our time then Quadrant four is not important and not urgent. Right? It's time wasting distractions. We want to spend our time in quadrant two. The that's time spent doing things like this. Immersing ourselves in wisdom, reading great books, meditating, exercising, spending quality time with our families. And the more time we spend in quadrant two, the less time we need to spend in quadrant one and three of really urgent time pressing stuff, which is where most people who are stressed spend their time. I'll put a link to that. We can talk about that for a weekend. But awesome. Big idea. We want to Think about how we can spend more time in quadrant two. That really renews us and feeds our soul. He talks about the importance of saying no. We've got to plant our priorities, deeply know what we stand for and be willing to say no to the stuff that isn't as important. Goethe says, where's that great quote? He says, things that matter least, things that matter most, should never be at the mercy of things that matter least. We've got to know our priorities and live consistently with them. That's habit number four. Habit number five is seek first, understand rather than looking to be understood. Take some time and imagine the other person's perspective. Understand where they're coming from. Awesome idea. Pretty straightforward. Big practice. Number six is the idea of synergy, and it comes from the Greek word to work together. And imagine you have one board and another board. The strength of those two boards, the amount of weight that those boards can sustain combined is greater than the amount of weight they could sustain together. I'm sorry, separate. Right, so it's one plus one equals more than two. One plus one equals three or more. In fact, that's the idea of synergy. Really, really cool idea. It's got some great examples. You can check out the note in the book for about how nature works, since that's habit number six. Habit number seven. One of my favorites, Sharpen the Saw. He tells a great story of a guy who runs up and finds a guy in the forest who's sawing down a tree. And he's sawing, sawing, sawing, sawing, sawing. And the guy says to him, hey, you know, you might want to slow down and sharpen your saw. I think that would really help you out. And the guy says, I'm too busy sawing down this tree to take the time to sharpen the saw. Right. Well, that's not going to work. It's kind of like saying, I'm driving too fast. I'm in too big of a hurry to stop for gas. At some point the car is going to stop, you're going to burn out. We need to take the time to sharpen our saws to renew ourselves. That's habit number seven. So that is a really, really quick look at the seven habits of highly effective people. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you found one big idea that you can implement into your life starting today. If you want to share it below, please do. Have an awesome day. Share more soon. See you.