The 7 Habits are designed to build from the foundation up — or the inside out — to establish a mindset, habits, and skills that help you identify and achieve the things that are most important to you. You don’t need to perfect each habit before moving onto the next; as you progress and grow, you will naturally continue to improve in all the previous habits. This is not a quick-fix program that you work through once and move on, it’s an ongoing process of personal growth and change.
Your habits are the expressions of your character; more than simple actions like having a habit of showering at night or going to the gym after work, habits include tendencies like procrastination and selfishness. Habits are behaviors that we perform unconsciously and repeatedly, day after day, that reveal our values and priorities.
Habits are tremendously powerful because they are generally unconscious and are ingrained in your routines; if you persist in the same habits, you will continue to see the same results in your life. However, with time, effort and commitment, you can break your habits and form new ones to produce the life and results you want. Through new habits, you can form new paradigms while breaking old paradigms that have been holding you back.
Habits are formed at the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. All three are necessary to create a lasting habit.
Imagine you want to improve your interactions with others because you tend to talk more than you listen, and you find this approach is generally ineffective — leading to misunderstandings, tension, and dynamics that are neither harmonious nor productive. To change your habit, you need to address all three aspects.
Physically and emotionally, you can be dependent (relying on others), independent (relying on yourself), or interdependent (working with others). As you go through life, you have the potential to mature from a paradigm of dependence to independence to interdependence; you must reach each one before you can progress to the next. This sequence is called the Maturity Continuum.
Dependence is the “you” paradigm. Someone who is dependent relies on you (or others in general) to fulfill their needs.
As infants, you begin life physically, mentally, and emotionally dependent on your parents and caregivers; you can’t get around by yourself, you rely on your parents to teach you how the world works, and you base your sense of identity and self-worth on what others reflect back to you.
Independence is the “I” paradigm. Independence is all about doing things for yourself, and not relying on others.
As you get older, you are able to be more self-reliant — from feeding yourself to making your own life decisions to being financially independent. Emotionally, you learn to derive your sense of worth from within, independent of others’ opinions of you.
Interdependence is the “we” paradigm. People who are interdependent have the ability and self-confidence that comes from independence, but also understand the power of working with others to achieve more than they could alone.
As you mature, you can begin to recognize the value of human relationships, cooperation, and collaboration. Interdependence is critical to succeed in all aspects of life, from marriage to family to the workplace. Even in nature, everything is interconnected in a careful balance to maintain powerful ecological systems.
Our current social paradigm — including popular approaches to self-improvement — tends to overvalue independence. But while independence is a critical step in the Maturity Continuum, interdependence is the ultimate goal. Independence is so highly valued largely as a rejection of dependence, and interdependence can be undervalued because its emphasis on working with others appears to resemble dependence.
Sometimes people do reckless, selfish things — such as leaving their marriages or families — in the name of independence. In reality, these acts typically reveal their lack of independence: In contrast to their claims, these people are often struggling with dependencies such as feeling controlled or victimized by other people and circumstances, so they change the circumstances instead of truly developing emotional independence.
The 7 Habits are designed to help you move incrementally along the Maturity Continuum, ultimately reaching interdependence.
The 7 Habits are meant to create maximum effectiveness in your life by focusing on core principles to produce the best long-term results. There is an important difference between efficiency and effectiveness: Efficiency is getting the most done in the least amount of time, while effectiveness is targeting your efforts to get the most important things done.
The key to effectiveness is balancing short-term results with long-term results — investing too much in one reduces the other.
In other words, effectiveness relies on the P/PC Balance.
Think of the P/PC Balance in terms of Aesop’s story of the goose that laid golden eggs: A farmer discovered one day that his goose had laid a solid golden egg. He was thrilled — and surprised when, the following day, the goose laid another golden egg. This continued day after day. Over time the farmer got greedy and impatient, and one day he killed the goose, thinking he would open up the body and collect all the golden eggs at once. But when he looked inside the dead goose, it was empty. There were no golden eggs (P), and now no goose left to produce them (PC).
The farmer valued the golden eggs over the goose — or the P over the PC — and the imbalance ultimately left him without either.
You must continually invest in maintaining the PC if you want to keep reaping the P. When you get impatient and push for short-term results (more P), you risk wearing out the mechanism that’s creating the results (PC).
There are three kinds of assets that have the capability (PC) to produce things (P): physical, financial, and human. Examples 1 and 2 above show how the P/PC Balance applies to physical and financial assets, but what is a human asset?
Human assets are the relationships we have with other people. It’s even more critical to maintain the P/PC Balance in relationships not only because relationships are important to your life and effectiveness, but also because people often control your access to physical and financial assets.
Marriage brings benefits to both people involved, including mental and emotional support as well as legal and financial benefits — double income, joint taxes, shared healthcare benefits, and shared rent/mortgage and other household costs. But if both partners neglect maintaining the health of their relationship, they risk the marriage falling apart and the loss of all those benefits that come with it.
Human assets must also be a priority for organizations: Think of how important customers and employees are to a business.
Successful companies spend a tremendous amount of effort and energy building trust and loyalty with their customers. If a company — whether manufacturing, retail, or food — compromises the quality of its product to make more profits (P), it jeopardizes its customers’ loyalty and continued business (PC).
The best companies also invest in their employees by offering good pay and benefits, creating a nurturing company culture, providing ample training, and via other methods. The executives at these companies understand that employees hold the PC to make sales, provide high-level customer service, make quality products, and perform other tasks necessary to create profits (P).
Covey suggests two paradigm shifts readers should make to gain the most benefit from reading 7 Habits.
First, don’t read it once and put it back on the shelf, as you would any other book. This book is designed to be a guide for repeated reference as readers continually grow and improve through the 7 Habits. As mentioned earlier, you won’t master the habits right away; it will be a process of deepening understanding and application.
Second, read this book as if you’re going to teach it to someone else. This mindset encourages you to seek a more thorough understanding of the importance and implementation of the 7 Habits than if you were passively absorbing the information as a mere student.
As you start incorporating the 7 Habits into your life, you’ll notice several effects in your life.