Quotes from Stephen R. Covey

whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife—whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well—a law as inexorable as gravity.

Whatever you can do, or dream, begin it! For boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. Dream no little dreams.

If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. It

Borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.

In making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn't, it affects

First, take responsibility for your life; and second, take initiative. It's that simple. Be an agent, not a victim. Don't wait for life to happen to you; happen to it. Be the driver of your life, not just a passenger. Live out of your imagination, not your past.

Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.

Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others.

their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn't a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.

Do not fear mistakes—fear only the absence of creative, constructive, and corrective responses to those mistakes.

The Seven Habits are habits of effectiveness.

This new level of thinking is what The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is about. It's a principle-centered, character-based, "inside-out" approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness.

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose

The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

The ability to listen first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And the ability to make yourself understood requires courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way communication where courage is balanced with consideration.

protected." We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

the four main ingredients of a successful family time: planning, teaching, problem-solving, and having fun. Notice how this one structure can meet all four needs—physical, social, mental, and spiritual—and how it can become a major organizing element in the family. But family time doesn't have to be that involved—especially at first. If you want, you can just begin to do some of these things at a special family dinner. Use your imagination. Make it fun.

Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism—anything that will keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love, only to be disappointed but also confirmed as to the rightness of the accusations made.

Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, "It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

awareness—making promises, setting goals, and being true to them—

The Abundance Mentality takes the personal joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment of Habits 1, 2, and 3 and turns it outward, appreciating the uniqueness, the inner direction, the proactive nature of others.

himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.

So I recommend reading literature, such as the inspiring biography of Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity, and seeing movies like Chariots of Fire or plays like Les Misérables that expose you to models of Win/Win.

Question 1: What one thing could you do (something you aren't doing now) that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?