Stephen Covey Quotes
-
You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.
-
Retire from your job but never from meaningful projects. If you want to live a long life, you need eustress, that is, a deep sense of meaning and of contribution to worthy projects and causes, particularly, your intergenerational family.
-
People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.
-
If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
-
But with the steady disintegration of the family in modern society over the last century, the role of the school in bridging the gap has become vital!
-
Trust is a powerful accelerator to performance and when trust goes up, speed also goes up while cost comes down - producing what we call a trust dividend.
-
Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.
-
We value the clock for its speed and efficiency. The clock has its place, efficiency has its place, after effectiveness. The symbol of effectiveness is the compass a sense of direction, purpose, vision, perspective, and balance. But the empowerment process itself is not efficient.
-
Don't cheat people of their growth. Empower them to solve problems and generate ideas. Watch them grow!
-
The average family spends 30 hours in front of a television, and they say they don't have the time to have a balanced, integrated life.
-
The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don't know what new dangers and challenges you'll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, discovery, and creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.
-
Trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, your motive and your intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, and your track record. Both are vital.
-
Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.
-
Vision is about more than just getting things done, accomplishing some task, achieving something; it is about discovering and expanding our view of others, affirming them, believing in them, and helping them discover and realize the potential within them-helping them find their own voice.
-
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
-
The great apparent dichotomy is that the more we give, the more we get.
-
In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment - independent will - that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
-
If we overcome the pull and "get up and get at it," we will have won a victory. We have kept our own resolve. We can then move to other things, for by small means great things are accomplished. Thus, even this one small step is also in another sense a giant leap.
-
You don't see the world as it is, you see it according to who you are.
-
Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.
-
To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which "life" is made.
-
Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.
-
There are principles that govern human effectiveness - natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably there as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.
-
The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.