39. The 8th Habit - Stephen R. Covey (📖)

Reading Notes:

If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvements, work on paradigms.

The four basic needs and motivations of all people: to live (survival), to love (relationships), to learn (growth and development) and to leave a legacy (meaning and contribution).

People make choices. Consciously or subconsciously, people decide how much of themselves they will give to their work depending on how they are treated and on their opportunities to use all four parts of their nature.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

The best way to get people to learn is to turn them into teachers.

Those who teach what they are learning are, by far, the greatest students.

To know and not to do, is really not to know.

There is nothing enligtened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

Your power to choose the direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation. It is the one gift that enables all the gifts to be used; it is the one gift that enables us to elavate our life to higher and higher levels.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his power. - Lucius Amaeus Seneca

You must gain control over the patterns that govern your mind: your worldview, your beliefs about what you deserve and about what’s possible. That’s the zone of fundamental change, strength, and energy – and the true meaning of courage. - Peter Koestenbaum

Cultivating the habit of affirming people, of frequently and sincerely communicating your belief in them – particularly teenagers who are going through their second identity crisis – is supremely important. It’s a relatively small investment with incalculable unbelievable results.

A new philosophy, a new way of life is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A wise leader once said, The most important work you do will be within the walls of your own home.

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. - Akbert Schweitzer

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.