The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

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The 7 Ways to Effectiveness: Principles for Personal and Professional Success (original title: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , translated as "The seven habits of highly effective people") is a self-help book first published in 1989 by the American author Stephen Covey . With more than 30 million copies sold and translations in 38 languages, it is one of the most famous such books.

The TIME magazine called the book in August 2011 as one of the twenty-five most influential books on management methods.

The seven habits

The book is divided into seven chapters according to the seven habits. These seven chapters can in turn be summarized in four basic principles:

  • Paradigm shift : Success can only be achieved by changing habits. Therefore, actions and perspectives must be reconsidered.
  • Switch from addiction to independence to achieve a successful private life. The first three habits (1–3) serve this purpose.
  • Switch from independence to interdependence to improve interpersonal relationships. Habits 4, 5, and 6 relate to it.
  • Recovery, renewal, and self-improvement: Chapter 7 refers to it.

The seven habits:

  1. Be proactive : think ahead and act before a situation or crisis occurs that requires a solution. Stop complaining about grievances and learn to be responsible for your own life and to shape it yourself.
  2. In the chapter Having the end in mind from the very beginning , a (life) goal should be defined. What words should I use to describe my life and personality at my funeral service ? If I should be remembered for my commitment to the family, for my friendliness or for my professional success - how can I achieve this?
  3. Priorities define and implement the chapter Put First Things First (Engl. First things first ): When people ask what things are important to them, they answer often with "health" or "a lot of time for the family have". But they still accept long working hours for their careers , or they eat in an unhealthy way out of convenience. If you think something is important, you have to take enough time for it - instead of fooling yourself.
  4. Think "win-win" : Develop a real feeling for mutually beneficial solutions. Achieving a compromise through appreciation and respect is better in the long term than pushing through your own interests. Instead of damaging someone with criticism, you can express honest praise, from which you benefit in the form of benevolence.
  5. Understand first, then be understood . The best way to make other people do something is to take care of them first, to listen to them and to let them influence you. This opens doors for your own concerns.
  6. Create synergies : Let other people participate in your own strengths by working together - and also use other people's strengths. This makes it possible to achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible for individuals to master.
  7. Sharpen the saw: A saw that has become fuzzy will no longer cut a tree. Sharpening a saw takes a lot of time. Likewise, maintaining and expanding one's own resources, one's abilities, and one's mental and physical health takes time. Without this care, long-term performance suffers. To achieve this, Covey recommends exercising, relaxation, prayer and meditation, continuing education, literature, culture, and volunteering.

Finally, in the seventh chapter, Covey explains how the constant cultivation and deepening of these seven habits leads to an upward spiral, namely to a constant improvement in personality .

Affluence mentality

In this work - especially in Chapter 4 - Covey advocates the abundance mentality - as opposed to a mindset that emphasizes scarcity . Abundance is a term from ecology and describes a resource that is so large that it meets the needs of all individuals. Thus, they are not in competition with one another, while scarce goods always lead to competition.

People with an affluence mentality assume that success, happiness and other resources are so great that they can always be shared with other people. Such a person does not consider situations in daily life to be a zero-sum game (i.e., someone has to lose something in order for someone else to gain something), and instead of feeling threatened or humiliated by other people, develops the skills and enjoyment of other people's successes . The harmful influence of the scarcity mentality or the assumption that human everyday life is a zero-sum game, however, was already described earlier by Paul Watzlawick in his popular "Ratgeber" Guide to Unhappiness (1983).

expenditure

English

  • Stephen Covey: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . Fireside Book, New York 1990, ISBN 0-671-70863-5 .

German

  • Stephen Covey: The seven ways to be effective. A concept for mastering your professional and private life . Heyne, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-453-09174-4 .
  • Stephen Covey: The 7 Paths to Effectiveness: Principles for Personal and Professional Success . GABAL, Offenbach 2005, ISBN 978-3-89749-573-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephen Gandel: The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books - The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (1989), by Stephen R. Covey. In: Time Magazine. August 9, 2011, accessed February 2, 2020 .