The fundamental principles in this book are forgotten treasures. Nowadays, principles are being locked up in basements as humans use "tricks" and "quick fixes" to manipulate other people and fix relationships. In the corporate world, people often sacrifice humility, integrity, and courage for the sake of public image, title, and recognition. This trend is what is known as the "Personality Ethic". Before the 1920's people relied on "Character Ethic". It was known that the way to success and effectiveness required people to possess qualities like integrity, courage, and humility. However, after a paradigm shift in the 1920s, came the era of personality instead of character.

The word "personality" is derived from Latin, where it originally refers to "a theatrical mask". So the persona is just a mask, it's the public image of your character. Trying to manipulate how you look to the outside world (personality), will not change how you are (character) on the inside.

The principles in this book are directed at strengthening your character and are guidelines for an effective life, not merely tricks to airbrush your personality.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

1. Be Proactive - Principles of Personal Vision  (Part I)
2. Begin with the End in Mind - Principles of Personal Leadership (Part I)
3. Put First Things First - Principles of Personal Management (Part I)
4. Think Win-Win - Principles of Interpersonal Leadership (Part II)
5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood - Principles of Empathic Communication     (Part II)
6. Synergize - Principles of Creative Cooperation (Part II)
7. Sharpen The Saw - Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal     (Part III)

Habits are consistent and often unconscious patterns, expressing who we are - our character - to the outside world without the selective permeability of our conscious mind. The emergence of our habits makes us who we are.

A good metaphor to visualize and understand what habits are is to imagine them as cables, weaved together every day as we exercise them. It becomes harder and harder to change a habit as time passes by because of the knitting that's already been done. The longer you've been exercising a habit, the more commitment it requires to untangle it.

"Habit is the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire."

- Stephen R. Covey

Knowledge is the what and the why. Skill is the how. Desire is the want. Unless all of these three are present, something won't become a habit.

The Maturity Continuum

As we walk on the rope of life, we go from dependence to independence, until we reach interdependence. When we begin life as an infant, we are dependent on our families. When we get to the teenager stage, we want to become independent, to stand on our own feet. Only after a certain while, do we realize that being independent is not sustainable. As we get more mature, we understand that we should be able to trust others in order to get moving. We have to be interdependent.

Habits 1, 2, and 3 are the habits that take you from a dependent person to an independent one. They are the essence of character growth. They are the Private Victories, as the author puts it.

"Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert the process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it. It's inside-out."

- Stephen R. Covey

Becoming truly independent paves the way for effective interdependence. This is where Habits 4, 5, and 6 come into play, a.k.a., Public Victories. They transition us from independence to interdependence.

Habit 7 is the balanced self-renewal of four basic dimensions of life - Physical, Mental, Social/Emotional, Spiritual. This habit requires proactivity. Mastering the first habit will ease the process of mastering the seventh habit.

Habit 1: Be Proactive (Principles of Personal Vision)

With the rise of attention marketing, we, and our attention have become an invaluable asset for many of the tech giants. This is crucial because it implies that a lot of bright minds are developing new ways to make you click that notification on your phone. If you don't take measures beforehand, you might simply become a zombie just like many others, i. e. you would become a reactive person.

Reactive people respond to events and problems only after they'd occurred. Whereas a proactive person focuses on eliminating the problem even before it has a chance to appear.

The first step to proactivity is self-awareness. If you don't have a personal vision of yourself, you can't change yourself.

The second step is to realize that we are not determined entirely by any of the following:

1. Genetic determinism: You are who you are because of your grandparents.
2. Psychic determinism: Your upbringing and childhood experience made you who you are.
3. Environmental determinism: Your boss and your friends caused you to become who you are.

As humans, we have this unique ability to pause between a stimulus from the outside world and our response to it. Our minds don't work the same as Pavlov's dogs. For instance, look at the word responsibility - "response-ability" - the ability to choose your response. By being a proactive person, we get a hold on the reins of responsibility and recognize that our behavior is not because of the circumstances or conditions. This is why we can re-program ourselves through the four human endowments.

The third step is to exercise these four human endowments to pave a new path for ourselves:

1. Self-awareness: Awareness of what the stimulus is and what your response to that stimulus is
2. Imagination: Imagining beyond our present reality and thus priming ourselves to a new path
3. Conscience: A deep inner awareness of what's right or wrong
4. Independent will: The ability to act based on our self-awareness, free of all other influences

Circle of Concern/Circle of Influence

There are some things in life that we all are concerned about: our health, our family, conflicts in our job, finances, inflation, national debt, nuclear war, etc. If we were to seperate these from things that we have no mental or emotional linkage whatsoever, we could call the prior as the "Circle of Concern". In this circle, there will be things that we can directly or indirectly control - "Circle of Influence" - and things that we have no authority over.

Proactive people focus on the circle of influence. They try to improve the things that they can have an impact on. They don't take things personally, and they only race with themselves.

Reactive people focus on the circle of concern. They use up all their energy by focusing on other people's weaknesses, problems in the environment, and circumstances in which they have no control over. The results of their focus is apparent by the reactive language, accusing attitudes, and increased feelings of victimization.

Switch your focus from focusing on what you have to what you can be.

Implementation of Habit 1: Be Proactive (Principles of Personal Vision)

Change your language!

• Make and keep commitments.
  • As we keep commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and to others, our honor becomes greater than our mood.
• Be a light, not a judge.
• Be a model, not a critic.
• Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
• When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, learn from it - immediately.
• Look at others' weaknesses with compassion, not with accusation.
• Love - the feeling - is the fruit of love - the verb. Make "love" a verb. Work on your relationship, this is not Hollywood, this is real life.

"The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happinness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove."

- Samuel Johnson

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind (Principles of Personal Leadership)

Start with a clear understanding of your destination. Take a few minutes to write down YOUR criteria for living YOUR life. Construct the framework that you would like to imagine yourself within. Each day, before drifting off to sleep, visualize yourself doing one mission-critical task (one that satisfies your criteria of life) for the next day. It doesn't have to take long. It can just be five minutes of deep and reflective thinking, writing, visualizing, helping someone in need, or anything else that suits your life goals.

These criteria are directed towards your life, but they're undoubtedly linked to what effect you choose to leave behind on other people. Never live your life thinking about what other people might think of you. This creates needless stress and it does more harm than good. Dwell on, however, on the effect you have on other people. Do you encourage them to live their lives healthier? Or do you help them get rid of their bad habits? If you do, you are probably be faced with rejection and resistance at the moment. In a few years' time though, the people you've helped change their habits will be so thankful for your efforts that they will feel never-ending gratitude towards you. This gratitude is what makes it worth living.

Don't get lost in the busyness of life, in the rat race, in the pursuit of climbing higher on the corporate ladder, only to realize that it's leaning against the wrong wall.

If every step you take just takes you to the wrong place faster, then you're simply the definition of ineffective busyness. You may be super-busy, super-efficient but unless you're truly effective, it's no good.

Habit 2 is based on the principle that all things are created twice. First, the mental creation, and second, the physical creation. We use this principle inherently. Before starting a project, we have a vision in mind for what should be the final product. Before we go on a trip, we determine the destination and plan out the best route. The carpenter's rule is "measure twice, cut once". You have to make sure that your first creation suits your needs and desires, that your blueprint is complete and thorough, and only after that, you should start working on that end goal.

I have a question for you: "Why do most businesses fail?". Most people presume it's because of a lack of marketing, personnel, or robust physical facilities. Whereas, in reality, most problems begin in the first creation, for instance, insufficient market saturation analysis (in layman's terms, misunderstanding the market), undercapitalization, or lack of a business plan.

By Design or By Default

One important observation is that not all first creations are by conscious design. If we don't develop self-awareness and do not take responsibility for the first creation of our lives, we empower other people to shape our lives by default. We reactively live scripts handed to us by our family, associates, other people's agendas, and pressures of circumstances. These scripts come from people not from principles. They arise from deep vulnerabilities, our dependency on others, our needs for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense of importance and worth, and for a feeling that we matter. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, circumstances, or of our past habits.

As Brendon Burchard points out: "Your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizing system for other people's agendas."

Leadership and Management

Leadership is the first creation. Leadership is about doing the right thing. Leaders create value. A leader uses inspiration to motivate others to move towards effective goals. A leader is a model. Not a critic.

Management is the second creation. Management is doing things right. Managers count value. A manager uses power and control to make the process more efficient, not necessarily effective.

The quickest way to figure out if you're a leader or a manager is to count the number of people outside your reporting hierarchy who come to you for advice. The more they do, the more likely it is that you are perceived as a leader.

Center -> Security, Guidance, Wisdom, and Power

Our center determines the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

1. Security is your sense of worth.
2. Guidance is your source of direction.
3. Wisdom is your perspective.
4. Power is your capacity to act.

Whether we're aware of it or not, we value some things in our lives more than others, so much so that we make them our centers. The key to a healthy and happy life arises from a balanced dependence on different possible centers. A list of different possible centers is as follows:

• Spouse - Centered
• Family - Centered
• Money - Centered
• Work - Centered
• Possession - Centered
• Pleasure - Centered
• Friend - Centered
• Enemy - Centered
• Church - Centered
• Self - Centered

A Principle Center

By basing our lives on correct principles, we can have a solid foundation for these four life-support factors.

Our security, i.e. our sense of worth, comes from knowing that, unlike other centers based on people or things that are subject to frequent and immediate change, correct principles don't change. We can depend on them.

Our guidance, i.e. our sense of direction, and our wisdom, i.e. our perspective, are constructed from accurate maps of the outside world. These maps are extrapolated from the way things really are, have been, and will be. Remember, a paradigm is like a pair of glasses; it affects the way you see everything in your life. Our guidance and wisdom come from a paradigm based on correct principles, which in turn becomes the source from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.

Our power, i.e. our capacity to act, comes from the nature of the self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual who is unrestricted from the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit people. When faced with a frustrating situation in which one feels helpless, a principle-centered individual will first try to expand his/her circle of influence to mitigate the negative effects of the situation. Only then, s/he will resort to shrinking his/her circle of concern, knowing that s/he has tried everything s/he could to mitigate the situation's negative effects but couldn't succeed due to some unforeseen obstacle. At this point, s/he can rest assured without being concerned about the situation with no guilt.

When it comes to making a decision, as a principle-centered person you have a number of differences from the rest of the centers:

1. You are not being acted upon by other people's agendas or circumstances. You are proactively choosing what you determine to be the best alternative. You make your decision consciously and knowledgeably.
2. You know your decision is the most effective because it is based on principles with long-term results.
3. What you choose to do contributes to your ultimate values in life. The experiences you have as you carry out your decisions take on quality and meaning in the context of your life as a whole.
4. You can communicate with anyone within the strong networks you have created in your interdependent relationships. Because you are independent, you can effectively be interdependent.

Personal Mission Statement

Victor Frankl says we detect rather than invent our missions in life. Our meaning comes from within. As he again points out: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible."

Habit 1 says, "You are the programmer", Habit 2, then says, "Write the program"

Until you accept the fact that you are responsible, and that you are the programmer, you won't invest much time in writing the program.

Stephen R. Covey points out that writing a mission statement is not an easy task: "A mission statement is not something you write overnight. It takes deep introspection, careful analysis, thoughtful expression, and many rewrites to produce a final form. It may take you several weeks or even months before you are comfortable with it before you feel it is a complete and concise expression of your innermost values and directions. Even then, you will want to review it regularly and make minor changes as the years bring additional insights or changing circumstances.

Fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion with which you measure everything else in your life."

Visualization and Affirmation

Detecting and writing down your values in life shouldn’t be a left-brain-only activity. You should also use your imagination to visualize what it is that you are trying to accomplish. When you lay down at night, look at where you see yourself now, and dwell on where you want to see yourself. You should never forget the end goal, but your utmost focus should be the path you’ll take to get there. Always focus on the present moment. Otherwise, you might end up feeling discouraged by looking at how long you have to keep going.

Top performers use visualization in their respective sports as their strongest tool. Almost all world-class athletes and peak performers are visualizers.” says Dr. Charles Garfield. Visualization has been shown to boost athlete’s technique even more than hands-on practicing in the short term.

Affirmations are like mini-programs that enforce your brain to change and feel the way you want to feel. They work because our brains have a property called “Plasticity”. Essentially, plasticity means that your brain can be rewired to function optimally in different ways. I won’t be going deep into plasticity but if you’d like to read more about it, the best book to dive into is “The Brain That Changes Itself”. A friend of mine from Cambridge, shoutouts to Arda, has recommended this book to me while we were in a computer science program at Stanford and this book has changed my life ever since. Whenever I feel hopeless I remember that even the things that seem the most impossible are probable.

A good affirmation has 5 basic elements:

1. Positive
2. Present Tense
3. Visual
4. Emotional
5. Personal

For instance, Covey gives the example of being a father who deeply loves his children but who has trouble on a daily basis because he overreacts. In this case, a good affirmation can be “It is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdom, love, firmness, and self-control (positive) when my children misbehave.”.

Identifying Roles and Goals

We have many roles in life, a spouse, a parent, a businessman, a teacher, etc. Determining how to act with a strong alignment to our principles in each one is crucial. Distinguish between your professional and personal roles and have separate goals and values for each of them. By doing this, you won't be consumed by a single part of your life in the name of effectiveness. By following these steps you can lay the foundations of your personal mission statement:

1. Determine your mission/values in life
2. Write down what you do to fulfill this mission/these values (Contributions)
3. Write down which roles take priority in achieving your mission/values (Character/Role)

Covey gives several examples for each:

1. My mission is to live with integrity and to make a difference in the lives of others.
2. I sacrifice: I devote my time, talents, and resources to my mission
3. Husband - my partner is the most important person in my life. Together we contribute the fruits of harmony, industry, charity, and thrift.

Family Mission Statement

Many families are managed on the basis of crises, moods, quick fixes, and instant gratification. Symptoms surface whenever stress and pressure mount: people become more cynical, critical, or silent or they start yelling and overreacting. Children who observe these kinds of behavior grow up thinking the only way to solve problems is to fight or flight.

The core of any family is what is changeless, what is always going to be there – shared vision and values. The process is as important as the product. The very process of writing and refining a mission statement becomes a key way to improve the family.

In my home, we put our mission statement on the refrigerator door so that we can look at them and monitor ourselves daily.

When we read the phrases about love, responsible independence, cooperation, order, helpfulness, meeting needs, developing talents, showing interest in each other’s talents, and giving service to others it gives us some criteria to know how we’re doing in the things that matter the most to us as a family.

Organizational Mission Statements

For organizations to have effective mission statements, these statements should come from within the organization. Every employee should participate in a meaningful way – not just the top strategy planners, but everyone.

Implementation of Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind (Principles of Personal Leadership)

• First, write your mission in life, just as we did in the subsection: Identifying Roles and Goals. Take a few moments and write down your roles in the character section as you see them. Are you satisfied with that mirror image of your life?

• Allocate only 10 minutes each morning for about a week or two to work on your personal mission statement. It is crucial that you separate yourself from daily activities while doing this since it requires deep introspection.
• Go through the different centers of life (in the chart below) and circle all those you can identify with

Possible Perceptions Flowing Out of Various Centers

Centers are listed on the left. Perceptions are listed in the intersections.

• Identify a project you might be undertaking in the near future. Utilize the principle of mental creation. Write down the results you desire and what steps will lead to those results.
• Share these principles with your family or your working group and begin the process of developing a family or organizational mission statement.

Habit 3: Put First Things First (Principles of Personal Management)

"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."

- Goethe

'Habit 3 is the practical fulfillment of Habits 1 and 2.

Habit 1 says, "You're the creator. You are in charge." It's based on the four unique human endowments of imagination, conscience, independent will, and, particularly, self-awareness. It empowers you to say, "That's an unhealthy program I've been given from my childhood, from my social mirror. I don't like that ineffective script. I can change."

Habit 2 is the first creation, the mental creation. It's based on imagination - the ability to envision, to see potential, to create with our minds what we cannot, at present, see with our eyes; and conscience - the ability to detect our own uniqueness and the personal, moral, and ethical guidelines within which we can most happily fulfill it. It's the deep contact with our basic paradigms and values and the vision of what we can become.

Habit 3, then, is the second creation, the physical creation. It's the fulfillment, the actualization, the natural emergence of Habits 1 and 2. It's the exercise of independent will toward becoming principle-centered. It's the day-in, day-out, moment-by-moment doing it.'

Management, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right-brain activity. It's more of an art form; it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with leadership issues.

Once you have solved these issues, the ability to manage yourself well determines the quality and even the existence of the second creation. Management is the breaking down, the analysis, the sequencing, the specific application, and the time-bound left-brain aspect of effective self-government.

Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what "first things" are, it is management that runs them on a daily basis.

Discipline derives from disciple - disciple to a philosophy, disciple to a set of principles, disciple to a set of values, disciple to an overriding purpose, to a superordinate goal, or a person who represents that goal.

In other words, if you are an effective manager of yourself, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, and the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, and your moods to those values.

Four Generations of Time Management

I am fascinated by how this single phrase captures the essence of the best thinking in the area of time management: Organize and execute around priorities. This phrase represents the evolution of three generations of time management theory, and how to best do it is the focus of a wide variety of approaches and materials.

Personal management has evolved in a pattern similar to many other areas of human endeavor. Major developmental thrusts, or “waves” as Alvin Toffler calls them, follow each other in succession, each adding a vital new dimension. For example, in social development, the agricultural revolution was followed by the industrial revolution, which was followed by the informational revolution. Each succeeding wave created a surge of social and personal progress.

Similarly, each generation in the area of time management builds on the one before it.

The first wave or generation could be characterized by notes and checklists, an effort to give some semblance of recognition and inclusiveness to the many demands placed on our time and energy.

The second generation could be characterized by calendars and appointment books. This wave reflects an attempt to look ahead, to schedule events and activities in the future.

The third generation reflects the current time management field. It adds to those preceding generations the important idea of prioritization, clarifying values, and comparing the relative worth of activities based on their relationship to those values. In addition, it focuses on setting goals—specific long-, intermediate-, and short-term targets toward which time and energy would be directed in harmony with values.

While the third generation has made a significant contribution, people have begun to realize that “efficient” scheduling and control of time are often not effective. The efficiency focus creates expectations that clash with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, meet human needs, and enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis.

The fourth generation is an emerging time management strategy. It recognizes that “time management” is really a misnomer—the challenge is not to manage time but to manage ourselves. Satisfaction is a function of expectation as well as realization. And expectation (and satisfaction) lie in our Circle of Influence.
Rather than focusing on things and time, fourth-generation expectations focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results.

Four Quadrants - Time Management Matrix

"The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."

- Stephen R. Covey

We spend time in one of four ways. The two factors that define an activity are urgent and important.

For instance, if you were to phone someone, there aren’t many people who would say, “I’ll get to you in 15 minutes; just hold.” But most people would probably let you wait in an office for at least that long while they completed a telephone conversation with someone else.

Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action. They’re often popular with others. They’re usually right in front of us. And often they are pleasant, easy, fun to do. But so often they are unimportant!

Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. Important things contribute to our mission, our values, and our high-priority goals.

We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative and proactivity. We must act to seize the opportunity, to make things happen. If we don't practice Habit 2, if we don't have a clear idea of what is important, of the results we desire in our lives, we are easily diverted into responding to the urgent.

Here are some of the common results of people's well-being if they spend the majority of their time in one of the given quadrants:

We all have Quadrant I activities in our lives. These are primarily "problems" or "crises". Individuals who are consumed by Quadrant I are crisis managers, problem-minded people, deadline-driven producers. As long as you focus on Quadrant I, it gets bigger until it dominates you. Some people are literally beaten up by problems all day every day. Their only relief is to escape to not important not urgent activities of Quadrant IV. Therefore, 90 percent of their time is spent in Quadrant I, and the remaining 10 percent is at Quadrant IV, only negligible attention is paid to Quadrants II and III.

Quadrant III focus encapsulates most developing countries' business cultures. Generally, some busywork is baptized as urgent and assumed to be important. Whereas in reality, this little to no value busywork drains the employees' energy, willingness, and overall morale. They then become political chameleon charactered people; changing their beliefs to please people and be close to them. They care about their reputation more than their character. They only care about their interests. If they don't get what they want, they start blaming other people and feel victimized, and out of control.

People who spend their time exclusively in Quadrants III and IV are basically leading an irresponsible life where they become dependent on others or institutions.

The more time you allocate to important but not urgent activities, the fewer crises you will have to solve and fewer problems you will have to deal with in the future. Individuals who spend the most time in Quadrant II build long-lasting relationships, engage in preventive maintenance activities, act in line with their values and vision, exercise, and plan long-term - all of these things are things we know we need to do, but somehow seldom get around to doing, because they aren't urgent.

Ask yourself: "What is the one thing you could do in your personal and professional life that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?" Quadrant II activities have that kind of impact. Our effectiveness takes quantum leaps when we do them.

How to Become More Effective? - What It Takes To Say "No" - Moving Into Quadrant II

To allocate more time to Quadrant II, you have to scrap some time from Quadrants III and IV because you can't ignore Quadrant I activities. You have to be proactive to work on Quadrant II because Quadrants I and III work on you. To say "yes" to important Quadrant II priorities, you have to learn to say "no" to other activities, sometimes apparently urgent things.

What most people confuse is that the enemy of the "best" is not the "worst", it's often the "good". There is a saying and a book that I like: "Hell yeah or no" by Derek Sivers. It stresses the fact that the activities worth doing often require you to say no to "meh" or even the "good" ones.

You have to decide on your highest priorities and have the courage to - pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically - say "no" to other things.

As economists would say: "You have to take into account the opportunity cost of what you're doing."

If you were to fault yourself in one of the three areas which would it be: "(1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them, to stay with your priorities and organization?

Most people point to the third reason - lack of discipline to execute around their priorities. I believe that this is not the case. I believe people don't have their priorities deeply internalized in their hearts and minds. When you have a strong "why" for something, you generally find the "how" quite easily, especially in this day and age. So "Start with Why" - Simon Sinek :)

It's almost impossible to say "no" to the popularity of Quadrant III or the pleasure of escaping to Quadrant IV if you don't have a bigger "yes" burning inside.

Implementation of Habit 3: Put First Things First (Principles of Personal Management)

• Identify a Quadrant II activity you know has been neglected in your life - one that, if done well, would have a significant impact on your life, either personally or professionally. Write it down and commit to implementing it.
• Draw a time management matrix and try to estimate how much of your time goes to which quadrant. Then log your time for three days in fifteen-minute intervals. How accurate was your estimate? Are you satisfied with the way you spend your time? What do you need to change?
• Convert your current planning tool into a fourth-generation time management tool, one that you use to "schedule your priorities", not to "prioritize what's on your schedule".