Revisiting Confidence and Leadership Lessons from Covey's '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'
Short Saturday Substack: Revisiting one of the best all-time reads for building confidence and leadership skills.
When kids enter high school, their first assignment should focus on reading and writing about Stephen R. Covey’s masterpiece: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The lessons can influence high schoolers at a prime age, and act as a prerequisite for any type of college education — and/or, better yet, entrepreneurism.
When these kids get to college, they should be re-tasked with reading and writing about Covey’s book. Yes, it’s that important.
Covey’s writing itself is powerful and straightforward (although I wished he used shorter paragraphs). He describes habits as the intersection of:
Knowledge (what to do and why)
Skill (how to do it)
Desire (the want to do, the motivation)
From there, he takes us on a concise ride of the following seven habits in life that take us from being dependent on others to independent to interdependent:
Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think win-win
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Synergize
Sharpen the saw
Putting all these habits into play will take your level of confidence and skill from zero to full throttle, and quickly.
And it’ll also make you more productive because you’ll get much more quality work completed in less time.
According to my 2013 edition (originally published in 1989), over 25 million copies were sold. The latest 30th-anniversary version takes that number to over 40 million copies sold.
And every successful entrepreneur and c-level exec I know has studied Covey’s work. A few, like myself, revisit these lessons yearly as part of leadership studies.
The intro of my copy features praise from everyone from Anthony Robbins and Michael Phelps to Tony Hsieh, Steve Young, Steve Forbes, and Seth Godin (the latter one of my all-time favorite writers in the world of marketing—read Purple Cow and you’ll see why).
If you haven’t read this, read it. If you have read it, read it again. And again next year.