Tuesday, September 18, 2007

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I'm just through the introduction and here's what I have gathered so far about The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Is your map correct?

If you're in KL and bought a map of KL, you'd expect to find the location of buildings and streets easily. But what if the map was wrongly named? What if that map was actually of Selangor but was mistakenly tagged KL. You can motivate yourself to find the location to the best of your abilities, but you wont be able to. You can work on your behaviour – trying harder, running harder, not giving up when people tell you that they don't know where the place is. But all of this isn't going to get you to where you want to go. Why? Because you're using the wrong map.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, maps are your paradigm – your view of the world, which is always clouded by your experience. Both of us can view the same incident but we'll both internalize the incident differently, based on our experience. That is why the elderly always smile seeing the young one's rush around in circle over petty issues. The young ones haven't had that experience to add to the paradigm.

What Covey is trying to say is that if you're going around in circle and not being able to achieve what you want, then maybe you could be following the wrong map.

That's as far as I have gotten, I'll delve further to see how to refine my map!

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