The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Covey's celebrated self-help program focuses on people, not things, and appeals to the integrity in all of us
What does it take to thrive? For noted motivator Stephen R. Covey, it all comes down to character. Here, in abridged but finely structured form, Covey lays out his best-selling program for interpersonal empowerment. Intercut with music, anecdotes, and satisfied testimony from adherents, this is the work of a sympathetic thinker and deft raconteur. Since its publication in 1989, 7 Habits continues to resonate in fields from business education and family psychology to leadership studies. Indeed, the eponymous habits have become pillars of modern self-help.

Covey himself narrates the audiobook, his quintessentially American accent enlivening a value system that, in less confident custody, could seem banal. Never submitting to the caprices of behavior, practice, or fad, he emphasizes principles — universal, autonomous principles to be (1–3) cultivated within oneself, (4–6) deployed in productive interaction, and (7) perpetually renewed as we "sharpen the saw." There's a sequence to it all, an order, but in celebrating progress and creativity Covey's approach resists mechanization: he focuses on people, not things; a compass, not a clock.

His vocabulary carries echoes of corporate sloganeering — synergy, win–win, mission statements — but Covey's conceptual precision eclipses these crutches. Predicated on an "abundance mentality," essentially the belief that there is more than enough to go around, his effectiveness is something quite distinct from metrics of "success" or, worse, "efficiency." Covey's method, encouraging but never insistent, appeals to the role of integrity in improving the tenor of our most valued relationships.