The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey, 1989

Opening hook

One Sunday morning, Stephen Covey was riding a subway in New York. The car was quiet. People read newspapers, dozed, stared at the floor in that polite stupor commuters everywhere recognize. Then a man got on with his children, and the children were wild. They were yelling, grabbing strangers' papers, throwing things. Their father sat down next to Covey, closed his eyes, and did nothing.

Covey held his temper for a few minutes. Then he turned to the father, with what he thought was admirable patience, and said something like: sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people on this train, could you control them a little more.

The man looked up as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. He said quietly: oh, you're right, I'm sorry. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either.

Covey describes that moment as a paradigm shift. Everything in him changed in a single sentence. The irritation evaporated. He saw the same scene with completely different eyes. The behavior was identical. The story underneath the behavior was something he could not have guessed. He writes that he suddenly wanted to do something for this family, and the impulse to scold turned into the impulse to help.

That subway story is the seed of the entire book. Covey spent years studying what he calls 200 years of American writing about success, and he noticed a sharp split. The first 150 years of that literature, roughly from Benjamin Franklin to the early 20th century, focused on what Covey calls the Character Ethic: integrity, humility, fidelity, courage, justice, patience, hard work, simplicity, modesty, the Golden Rule. Success was a function of who you actually were on the inside.