The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

BY DESIGN OR DEFAULT

It’s a principle that all things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious

design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and do not become

responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of

Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by

family, associates, other people’s agendas, the pressures of circumstance—scripts from our

earlier years, from our training, our conditioning.

These scripts come from people, not principles. And they rise out of our deep vulnerabilities,

our deep dependency on others and our needs for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense

of importance and worth, for a feeling that we matter.

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first

creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design,

or we are the second creation of other people’s agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

The unique human capacities of self-awareness, imagination, and conscience enable us to

examine first creations and make it possible for us to take charge of our own first creation, to

write our own script. Put another way, Habit 1 says, “You are the creator.” Habit 2 is the first

creation.

LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT—THE TWO CREATIONS

Habit 2 is based on principles of personal leadership, which means that leadership is the first

creation. Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, which we’ll discuss

in the chapter on Habit 3. But leadership has to come first.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership

deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter

Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right

things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines

whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of

producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They’re the producers, the

problem solvers. They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.

The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure

manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies and setting

up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.

The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells,

“Wrong jungle!”

But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? “Shut up! We’re

making progress.”

As individuals, groups, and businesses, we’re often so busy cutting through the undergrowth

we don’t even realize we’re in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which

we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been—in every aspect of

independent and interdependent life.

We are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or

directions) and less in need of a road map. We often don’t know what the terrain ahead will be

like or what we will need to go through it; much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an

inner compass will always give us direction.

Effectiveness—often even survival—does not depend solely on how much effort we expend,

but on whether or not the effort we expend is in the right jungle. And the metamorphosis taking

place in most every industry and profession demands leadership first and management second.

In business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that

successfully met consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive

powerful leadership must constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer

buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right

direction.

Such changes as deregulation of the airline industry, skyrocketing costs of health care, and the

greater quality and quantity of imported cars impact the environment in significant ways. If

industries do not monitor the environment, including their own work teams, and exercise the

creative leadership to keep headed in the right direction, no amount of management expertise can

keep them from failing.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, “like

straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.” No management success can compensate for failure in

leadership. But leadership is hard because we’re often caught in a management paradigm.

***

At the final session of a year-long executive development program in Seattle, the president of an

oil company came up to me and said, “Stephen, when you pointed out the difference between

leadership and management in the second month, I looked at my role as the president of this

company and realized that I had never been into leadership. I was deep into management, buried

by pressing challenges and the details of day-to-day logistics. So I decided to withdraw from

management. I could get other people to do that. I wanted to really lead my organization.

“It was hard. I went through withdrawal pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the

pressing, urgent matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of immediate

accomplishment. I didn’t receive much satisfaction as I started wrestling with the direction

issues, the culture building issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing of new

opportunities. Others also went through withdrawal pains from their working style comfort

zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had given them before. They still wanted me to be

available to them, to respond, to help solve their problems on a day-to-day basis.

“But I persisted. I was absolutely convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I did.

Today our whole business is different. We’re more in line with our environment. We have

doubled our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I’m into leadership.”

***

I’m convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of

control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.

And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We’re into managing with

efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

RESCRIPTING: BECOMING YOUR OWN FIRST CREATOR

As we previously observed, proactivity is based on the unique human endowment of selfawareness.

The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand our

proactivity and to exercise personal leadership in our lives are imagination and conscience.

Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us.

Through conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles with our own

singular talents and avenues of contribution, and with the personal guidelines within which we

can most effectively develop them. Combined with self-awareness, these two endowments

empower us to write our own script.

Because we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing

our own script is actually more a process of “rescripting,” or paradigm shifting—of changing

some of the basic paradigms that we already have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts, the

incorrect or incomplete paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to rescript ourselves.

***

I think one of the most inspiring accounts of the rescripting process comes from the

autobiography of Anwar Sadat, past president of Egypt. Sadat had been reared, nurtured, and

deeply scripted in a hatred for Israel. He would make the statement on national television, “I will

never shake the hand of an Israeli as long as they occupy one inch of Arab soil. Never, never,

never!” And huge crowds all around the country would chant, “Never, never, never!” He

marshalled the energy and unified the will of the whole country in that script.

The script was very independent and nationalistic, and it aroused deep emotions in the people.

But it was also very foolish, and Sadat knew it. It ignored the perilous, highly interdependent

reality of the situation.

So he rescripted himself. It was a process he had learned when he was a young man

imprisoned in Cell 54, a solitary cell in Cairo Central Prison, as a result of his involvement in a

conspiracy plot against King Farouk. He learned to withdraw from his own mind and look at it to

see if the scripts were appropriate and wise. He learned how to vacate his own mind and, through

a deep personal process of meditation, to work with his own scriptures, his own form of prayer,

and rescript himself.

He records that he was almost loath to leave his prison cell because it was there that he

realized that real success is success with self. It’s not in having things, but in having mastery,

having victory over self.

For a period of time during Nasser’s administration Sadat was relegated to a position of

relative insignificance. Everyone felt that his spirit was broken, but it wasn’t. They were

projecting their own home movies onto him. They didn’t understand him. He was biding his

time.

And when that time came, when he became president of Egypt and confronted the political

realities, he rescripted himself toward Israel. He visited the Knesset in Jerusalem and opened up

one of the most precedent-breaking peace movements in the history of the world, a bold initiative

that eventually brought about the Camp David Accord.

Sadat was able to use his self-awareness, his imagination and his conscience to exercise

personal leadership, to change an essential paradigm, to change the way he saw the situation. He

worked in the center of his Circle of Influence. And from that rescripting, that change in

paradigm, flowed changes in behavior and attitude that affected millions of lives in the wider

Circle of Concern.In developing our own self-awareness many of us discover ineffective scripts, deeply embedded

habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we really value in life.

Habit 2 says we don’t have to live with those scripts. We are response-able to use our

imagination and creativity to write new ones that are more effective, more congruent with our

deepest values and with the correct principles that give our values meaning.

Suppose, for example, that I am highly overreactive to my children. Suppose that whenever

they begin to do something I feel is inappropriate, I sense an immediate tensing in the pit of my

stomach. I feel defensive walls go up; I prepare for battle. My focus is not on the long-term

growth and understanding but on the short-term behavior. I’m trying to win the battle, not the

war.

I pull out my ammunition—my superior size, my position of authority—and I yell or

intimidate or I threaten or punish. And I win. I stand there, victorious, in the middle of the debris

of a shattered relationship while my children are outwardly submissive and inwardly rebellious,

suppressing feelings that will come out later in uglier ways.

Now if I were sitting at that funeral we visualized earlier, and one of my children was about to

speak, I would want his life to represent the victory of teaching, training, and disciplining with

love over a period of years rather than the battle scars of quick fix skirmishes. I would want his

heart and mind to be filled with the pleasant memories of deep, meaningful times together. I

would want him to remember me as a loving father who shared the fun and the pain of growing

up. I would want him to remember the times he came to me with his problems and concerns. I

would want to have listened and loved and helped. I would want him to know I wasn’t perfect,

but that I had tried with everything I had. And that, perhaps more than anybody in the world, I

loved him.

The reason I would want those things is because, deep down, I value my children. I love them,

I want to help them. I value my role as their father.

But I don’t always see those values. I get caught up in the “thick of thin things.” What matters

most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors.

I become reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little

resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them.

Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my

deepest values. I can realize that the script I’m living is not in harmony with those values, that

my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have

deferred to circumstances and other people. And I can change. I can live out of my imagination

instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I

can become my own first creator.

To begin with the end in mind means to approach my role as a parent, as well as my other

roles in life, with my values and directions clear. It means to be responsible for my own first

creation, to rescript myself so that the paradigms from which my behavior and attitude flow are

congruent with my deepest values and in harmony with correct principles.

It also means to begin each day with those values firmly in mind. Then as the vicissitudes, as

the challenges come, I can make my decisions based on those values. I can act with integrity. I

don’t have to react to the emotion, the circumstance. I can be truly proactive, value driven,

because my values are clear.