The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R. Covey

Stephen R. Covey passed away in July 2012, leaving behind an unmatched legacy with his teachings about leadership, time management, effectiveness, success, and even love and family. A multimillion-copy bestselling author of self-help and business classics, Dr. Covey strove to help readers recognize the key elements that would lead them to personal and professional effectiveness. His seminal work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, transformed the way people act on their problems with a compelling, logical, and well-defined process. Indeed, many of the habits have been assimilated into everyday thinking and everyday conversation. For example, the expressions “win/win” and “first things first,” to name a few, have been incorporated into almost every business culture around the world.

The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R. Covey is a compilation of Dr. Covey’s most insightful, inspiring teachings and sayings. His profound influence spread beyond businesses and individuals and was even integrated into governments, school systems, and many other institutions with great success. This book covers his most impactful topics: time management, success, leadership—including principle-centered leadership— all of the 7 Habits, love, and family. This powerful collection is a lasting tribute to the inspirational luminary that so many will miss.

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Selected Wisdom from Stephen R. Covey:

“How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.”

“Live, love, laugh, leave a legacy.”

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, ‘I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,’ that person cannot say, ‘I choose otherwise.’”

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” “To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.”

INTRODUCTION

This book contains the crystallized wisdom of one of the great teachers of our time, Dr. Stephen R. Covey.

As a young man, Dr. Covey was expected to to work in his family hotel business, but that wasn’t the path for him. He wanted to make a different contribution—to be a teacher, to dedicate his life to unleashing human potential. “Every human being is precious,” he wrote, “endowed with enormous, almost infinite potential and capacity.”

To that end he studied at Harvard graduate school, became a university professor, and then widened his circle of influence as a consultant to business and government leaders. With the 1989 publication of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, considered by many the most influential book of our time, Dr. Covey had—and continues to have—worldwide impact. This book and his others can be found in home and office libraries literally around the globe.

Not only his teaching but his life reminds us of the power of enduring principles. He was not interested in riding fads or pandering for publicity. His passion was to articulate and teach the unchanging, immutable, and ageless truths of life—truths that apply equally well to professional success and to deep personal satisfaction. He also lived by those truths, as countless friends, family members, and students of Dr. Covey will attest.

Arranged under the decisive principles of life—such as integrity, life balance, vision, and love—the stories and quotations in this book teach those principles in accessible, gemlike form.

Although Dr. Covey has passed from us, we will always have the benefit of his timeless teachings—that truth is truth and is self-evident, that you can’t live without principle and expect the universe to accommodate you, and that your life is a precious one that you can waste in mediocrity or invest in greatness.

—The Covey Family