The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: A Book Review

Introduction: Covey and the Appeal of the 7 Habits

Stephen R. Covey was born in 1932 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He earned his undergraduate degree in business administration from the University of Utah, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Doctorate in Religious Education from Brigham Young University. (Covey is a practicing Mormon.) He is currently a professor in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Covey is perhaps best known for his 1989 bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; to date, the book has sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide. It seems worthwhile to ask, therefore, what this book has to say that has earned it such broad popularity.

The biggest clue lies in the title. Covey believes that behavior can be defined as a set of habits, and he presents his own lessons in the form of "7 Habits" which he promises will increase one's effectiveness. In some sense, this is very similar to the teachings of other self-development thinkers: much as Wayne Dyer borrowed the scientific notion of the "meme" — first proposed by Richard Dawkins — to explain how certain habits of thought can be adopted accidentally and then repeated on autopilot, Covey proposes a practical ethics in the form of simple behavioral changes. If bad habits can be adopted, why can't good habits be adopted in the same way? This seems to be the basic premise of Covey's method. This overall worldview is particularly relevant to issues of health and wellness, and stress management in particular, in that it focuses on implementable solutions to behavioral problems. Covey's purpose is larger still: he offers a program of self-improvement drawn from his exhaustive reading of 200 years of American self-help literature, and his goal is to increase the reader's "effectiveness" in whichever area he or she chooses to pursue. Whether in work or play, any activity that relies in some measure on the workings of habit within the human personality — which encompasses more or less anything that is not completely spontaneous — can be altered according to Covey's scheme.

Paradigm Shifts and the Character Ethic

The book is designed to be user-friendly, and nothing is easier than summarizing its key components. It breaks down into the "7 Habits" advertised in the title. Before addressing each habit in order, however, it is important to understand a term that is pivotal to Covey's worldview, introduced in the book's opening section: "paradigm shift." As Covey explains in "Part One: Paradigms and Principles," he has taken this terminology from Thomas Kuhn, the noted philosopher and historian of science and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn observed that major scientific discoveries require people to adjust their existing worldviews to accommodate new facts. The new "paradigm" functions as a fresh explanation for the nature of things, as well as a complete set of rules, principles, and laws — often entirely overturning the existing order.

Covey offers the example of the shift in astronomy at the time of Copernicus, who first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. This did not produce an overnight change in how all of Europe understood the cosmos; the shift from the Ptolemaic paradigm to the Copernican paradigm was gradual and contested. Covey himself would like his habits to represent a comparable paradigm shift, one that concentrates on what he calls the "Character Ethic" rather than the "Personality Ethic" — his term for stressing the fundamentals of one's own mental paradigm, rather than offering fashionable quick fixes that do not alter the underlying paradigm in any significant way. That is why, in order to alter behavior by altering habit, one must select those habits that represent, as Covey puts it in his introductory section, "the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow."

Habits One Through Three: Personal Effectiveness

The first habit is accordingly radical in its attempt to alter behavior: "Be Proactive." In this section, Covey emphasizes that human behavior can be changed, but it requires active participation to do so. Proactivity is the opposite of reactivity — a passive state of mind in which things are merely done to the individual. Proactivity in Covey's terms requires "taking the initiative" (not to be confused, as he notes, with "being pushy, obnoxious, or aggressive"), and it is even reflected in habits of language. Passive verbs indicate a passive mindset, whereas active verbs indicate proactivity. There is an ethical component in what Covey says here, but he is careful to equate being "responsible" with being "response-able" — in other words, what we would ordinarily define as mature ethical behavior is rendered practically valuable when Covey emphasizes that such behavior stems from an investment in one's life and a willingness to view all events as prompts for an active response. This is, as Covey notes, the most important habit to cultivate, since one cannot effectively change one's own habits without genuine investment in, and attention to, one's own life.

The second habit is more of a procedural rule: "Begin With the End in Mind." Covey means that one needs to understand one's larger ultimate values and goals in order to act effectively toward their fulfillment. He introduces this idea with the classic memento mori motif: he asks the reader to envision, three years from the present date, his or her own funeral, in order to take stock of those ultimate values and goals. As Covey puts it, "if the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster." The overall destination — within the context of life's larger journey — must be identified. Covey terms this a "center" and invites the reader to identify what kind of "centeredness" his or her life has: spouse, family, money, work, possessions, pleasure, friends, enemies, church, or self.

Habit three, "Put First Things First," asks the reader to consider questions of time management and prioritization. This is perhaps the most important chapter from the standpoint of stress management, as it asks the reader to rank activities not by urgency or deadline pressure but by their overall intrinsic importance. As Covey puts it, comparing the habits to computer software: "If Habit 1 says 'You're the programmer,' and Habit 2 says 'write the program,' then Habit 3 says 'run the program,' 'live the program.'" The first tasks to be accomplished are those that must be done at the outset with the goal of the overall paradigm shift in mind. With this third habit, the first section of the book concludes, leaving habits one through three as a triad concerned with the reader's own internal mental behavior. From this foundation, Covey turns to the subject of interpersonal relations.

Conclusion: Covey's Method in Context

I am overall favorably impressed by Covey's 7 Habits, and more particularly by his method. In terms of its relevance to health, wellness, and stress management, Covey's approach — which he emphasizes is based on 200 years of the best prior research — appears to draw from a foundational text in mental health and wellness: The Principles of Psychology, published by Harvard Professor William James (brother of the novelist Henry James) in 1890. James claimed that "Habit is…the enormous fly-wheel of society" that keeps the social machinery operating, and he observed that "the great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague" (James, 121–2). William James identified the problem in the first American guidebook to psychology, and Covey — aware of the long history of American writing on these topics — offers a solution.

The surest test of Covey's method would be to attempt it — which was not possible in the course of writing this review, but which I intend to pursue. His writing is persuasive enough that I am convinced his method must be effective. Certainly from the standpoint of stress management, Covey's final rule — "Sharpen the Saw" — offers the best single piece of advice in that regard, as it asks us to identify and forestall potential stress in advance.

Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Free Press, 1989. Print.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1950. Print.