The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Before you can adopt the seven habits, you'll need to accomplish what Covey calls a "paradigm shift"--a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your "proactive muscles" (acting with initiative rather than reacting), and much more.

This isn't a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you'll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you'll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you'll feel like you've taken a powerful seminar by Covey. --Joan Price

Amazon.com Audiobook review
Anyone who thinks the audiocassette adaptation of Stephen Covey's bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is a shortcut to reading the book has another thing coming. As a preview, the cassette is worth every one of its 90 minutes; as a substitute for the original, it will only leave you wishing for the rest. There's a reason 7 Habits has sold more than 5 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. Serious work has obviously gone into it, and serious change can likely come out of it--but only with constant discipline and steadfast commitment. As the densely packed tape makes immediately clear, this is no quick fix for what's ailing us in our personal and professional lives.

The tape opens to the silky-smooth, overtrained voice of the female narrator, who's responsible for tying together audio clips from actual Covey seminars. Leaving aside the occasional attempts at promoting Covey and his institute, her script does a first-rate job of making sense of Covey's own intense, analogy-rich style of explaining his habits. There's nothing simple about his approach to becoming an effective person. The first three habits alone--which have to do with personal responsibility, leadership, and self-management--could take years to master. Yet the last four are unattainable, the narrator insists, if you can't acquire the personal security--the "inner core," says Covey--that presumably comes from a mastery of the foundation.

Throughout our lessons, Covey's presence is both learned and thoroughly appealing. He drops references to the likes of Socrates, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost with the aplomb of an English professor. And his knack for mixing everyday stories with abstract concepts manages to clarify difficult issues while respecting our intelligence. You could argue that the cassette is nothing more than a clever marketing tool for selling another few million copies of the book. But, even at that, it's worth the investment in time and concentration: in the end, we're moved to learn more about integrating all seven habits in our struggle to become better and, yes, more effective people. (Running time: 1.5 hours, one cassette) --Ann Senechal

Certainly the principles in this book are simple, but the challenge is to put them into practice. The greatest self-help books teach us nothing new, but rather remind us of the things we know in our hearts but have forgotten in our lives. This is the strength of the 7 Habits: a concrete formulation that you can keep in front of you, day in and day out, as a benchmark for how you live your life.

Of course the 7 Habits are idealistic; without ideals, how would we know what to strive for? It does not matter that we cannot attain perfection; you don't give up the game of golf just because you don't score eighteen holes-in-one. The struggle is the point, and in the struggle to improve oneself the 7 Habits is an excellent guidebook.


A good read for the dark valley   Juillet 20, 2001
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The first time I read this book I was going through the dark valley of the journey of life. I read many self-help books along the way to sort of try to get out of the valley. What I found was that time and life help get out of that dark valley more than anything else. But of all the self-help books I read this is the only one I kept because the concepts are so sound. One thing the author asks you to do is put to paper what you really believe in. It took me six months to think that one through and now I live by my beliefs as written. So read this book if you're in need of some thought provoking information for the journey.


Good book full of human truths, but is it "all that"?   Juillet 20, 2001
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Be advised: The Seven Habits are not "No Money Down."

The Seven Habits are about restructuring and reprioritizing your life, redefining success and thereby attaining it. Make youreself a success at life first, and the other rewards will fall into place.

There is nothing new in the book, though that doesn't mean there is nothing eye-opening or moving. A truth regained can, after all, be as revelatory as a truth discovered.

Accustomed to somewhat heavier, drier tomes of eastern thought, I found this book a bit sugary... easy to digest, but just as easily gone from the system once I put the book down. A more modern reader, however, may find it just the ticket; and I found reading it with my wife to be more meaningful than reading it alone.

So, the book may or may not literally change your life depending on your investment in it, but there are far worse things you could be spending your time reading, and is not the pursuit of the way also the way?