The Seven Habits of Highly Effecitve People - 2
Following summary is extracted from “Habit 2” of .
NOTE: Most of this summary are full quotes from the book; all diagrams are copied from the book.
Begin With The End (of Your Life) In Mind
Stephen invited readers to an interesting experiment: asking us envision our own funeral. He asks us what we would want the speakers at our funneral to think about ourselves - what kind of a husband/dad/friend/coworker we were.
This really forced me to evaluate what matters to me in life. I can really feel part of myself resisting to admitting what I felt to be most important to me. This excercise can make me be honest and comfortable with myself about where I want to steer my life.
However, I do believe the answer to this vision will change as time goes by. The more honest I can be in answering myself, the less likely the answer will change in the future.
Today, the honest answer to myself is that I couldn’t careless about what the speakers think of me in my funeral. When I’m gone, that’s end of the story for me. It might be that I want to live a life that is not affected by others’ opinions about me (aka: a life in which I don’t give a … about what others think about me.)
But this is just the answer of a 2-minute dream. I should do this on a regular basis in longer session. And be utterly honest each time.
All Things Are Created Twice
There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation, to all things.
This is simply: you need to vividly envision what the end goal of everything you do before you actually do it. It’s like the second step in project planning recommended, called “Outcome Visioning” by Getting Things Done by Allen.
The Four Pillars at the Center Of the Circle of Influence
- Security represents sense of worth, identity, emotional anchorage, self-esteem, basic personal strength or lack of it.
- Guidance means source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment-by-moment decision-making and doing.
- Wisdom is perspective on life, sense of balance, understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment and comprehenstion. It is an integrated wholeness.
- Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.
Different Centers
We can categorize our own centers given how the previous four pillars applied to us. There are various centers, namely “family”, “money”, “possession”…
We should strive for a “principle” center. And to get there, we can make use of a Peronsl Mission Statement.
Create Your Personal Mission Statement
- Create your own principles through which you navigate through lives’ events.
- Get in touch with your creative and visual capabilities to draw out your principles.
- Affirm your principles with creativeness and visualization: imagine a very detail situation and visualize your response based on your principles and its consequences.
- Organize your personal mission statement around roles and goals can be a good start.
Favorite Quotes
Mangement is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. ~ Peter Drucker/Warren Bennis
He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail. ~ Abraham maslow
Leadership is communicating to another their worth and potential so clearly they are inspired to see it in themselves. ~ Stephens Covey’s dad.
Personal Thought
- This chapter is especially helpful. I like the practical suggestion of writing up a personal mission statement. The category of “centeredness” is interesting.
- On a side note, self-help books are very good at persuading readers to buy their categorization. Each will come up with different models to describe abstract phenomenoms and you will believe them. It’s as if our critical brain slept through all these pages. It could be that because these books are already famous, we are actively telling our critical self to not get in the way so we can fully trust the books, which enables us to follow them and become better (hopefully).
- Interestingly, [You Are What You Think] claims that humans have four fundamental needs. It persuades you to change your lens through which you perceive and react to the world so that the fundamental needs are more likely achieved. The Seven Habits claims there are “true natural principles of the world” which will lead a person to true happiness if his personal map aligns with these principles but never stated specifically what those principles are.