The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - 1 summary

If you’ve ever tried to navigate the streets of a foreign city, you know that a map is useful.

But when you navigate the world around you, instead of a map with streets and addresses, you use your paradigms to guide you. A paradigm is the subjective way each of us perceives and understands the world.

What distinguishes humans from animals? One crucial difference is that animals are slaves to external stimuli, and can only react to these stimuli in the preprogrammed way that is in their nature.

We humans, in contrast, can reflect on a stimulus before responding to it, and we can even reprogram ourselves to respond in a specific, desirable way.

Whenever you perform an action, you’re actually performing it twice: first in your mind, when you imagine it, and then physically, when you do it.

For example, if you build a house, you’ll first visualize what kind of house you want, making plans for the layout and the rooms and the garden, all before a single brick is laid. If you didn’t take the time to do this, the construction itself would likely prove very chaotic and expensive: without a plan to follow, there’d no doubt be costly missteps, like forgetting to leave room for stairs leading from the ground floor to the second.

Here’s a small mental exercise. Imagine that it’s three years in the future, and, sadly enough, you’ve passed away. Take a moment to visualize your own funeral. Imagine your loved ones – your partner, your best friend, maybe your dearest colleague – giving eulogies. Now ask yourself what you’d like them to say. What sort of person do you want to be remembered as? For what do you want to be remembered?

Unfortunately, many people spend their time working toward goals that don’t really matter to them, because they never stopped to define them properly. In short, they fail to understand the difference between being efficient and being effective.

Now that you have a mission, how can you proactively take charge and make it into a reality? Simple: by living it, day in and day out.

Of course, in the midst of your everyday hassles, roles and relationships, this can be challenging, and it demands good time-management skills.

When you interact with others, what kind of outcome do you usually look for?

Most people’s worldviews are shaped by a strong "win-lose" paradigm. This means they see any interaction with others, whether at work or in their personal life, as basically a competition, where they need to fight the other person for the bigger slice of pie.

A relationship with another person is kind of like an emotional bank account: by putting time, effort and good will into it, the balance of the account grows, reflecting the increasing trust between the two parties. A healthy balance on your account means that both parties are flexible and any miscommunications are quickly sorted out.

If, on the other hand, the balance is zero, there’s no flexibility and the relationship is like a minefield: every word has to be carefully chosen to avoid explosive conflict.

Imagine walking into a doctor’s office and having the doctor listen absentmindedly to the first few seconds of your description of your ailment before announcing, “I’ve heard enough,” and handing you a prescription.

Or what if an optician gave you his own glasses, without bothering to check your eyesight, claiming that since he can see fine with them, they should work for you, too?

We now come to a habit that all the previous habits you’ve learned have prepared you for: synergizing. Synergy means a situation where the contributions of many add up to a total that exceeds the combined contributions of the individuals. One plus one can equal three or more.

So how can you implement this principle in your own social interactions?

If lumberjacks spent all their time sawing down trees but never once paused to sharpen their saws, they’d soon have such dull tools that they couldn’t fell a single tree.

Similarly, if you never pause to take care of yourself, any gains in effectiveness you achieve will be short-lived, for you’ll soon exhaust yourself and won’t be able to maintain any of the good habits you’ve developed.