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More energy was spent in the first few minutes of lift-off, in the first few miles of travel, than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles.
Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force, and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the cohesiveness and order necessary to establish effectiveness in our lives.
Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.
Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
Life is, by nature, highly interdependent. To try to achieve maximum effectiveness through independence is like trying to play tennis with a golf club—the tool is not suited to the reality.
I also realize that you and I working together can accomplish far more than, even at my best, I could accomplish alone.
It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.
In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They’re driven by feelings.
If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.
Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do:
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results. It takes more time in the beginning, but it’s time well invested. You can move the fulcrum over, you can increase your leverage, through stewardship delegation.
Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people.
We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.
Empathic listening is, in and of itself, a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It’s deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person “psychological air.”
Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.
When it comes right down to it, other things being relatively equal, the human dynamic is more important than the technical dimensions of the deal.
If you don’t have confidence in the diagnosis, you won’t have confidence in the prescription.
Constant probing is one of the main reasons parents do not get close to their children.
To many, seek first to understand becomes the most exciting, the most immediately applicable, of all the Seven Habits.
The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the individual, to listen with empathy, to let the person get to the problem and the solution at his own pace and time.
And being influenceable is the key to influencing others.
Our mission is to empower people and organizations to significantly increase their performance capability in order to achieve worthwhile purposes through understanding and living principle-centered leadership.
As you increase your body’s ability to do more demanding things, you’ll find your normal activities much more comfortable and pleasant.
Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
you are free to act instead of being acted upon, to choose your own response to any stimulus.
Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce—to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That’s true financial independence.
It’s not having wealth; it’s having the power to produce wealth. It’s intrinsic.
there is a gap or a space between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space.
Change—real change—comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quick fix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root—the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.
Integrity means being integrated or centered on principles not on people, organizations, or even family.
