![]() He rejected the view of those who shout from the rooftops, "There is nothing sacred, nothing enduring, nothing durable to build upon in this ever-changing landscape! Everything is new! Nothing from the past applies!" Covey believed that timeless principles do indeed exist, and that the search for them is not folly, but wisdom. ![]() In a world of change, disruption, chaos, and relentless uncertainty, people crave an anchor point, a set of constructs to give them guidance in the face of turbulence. This is why they work, and why they speak to people in all age groups around the globe. The ideas embedded in the framework are timeless. “Win/Win or No Deal.” “Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood.” “Begin with the End in Mind.” “Do First Things First.” He made the ideas even more accessible by using personal life-struggles and stories-raising children, building a marriage, dealing with friends-to teach the habits and build muscle fiber for living them. Some of his conceptual wrapping paper worked exceptionally well, being both descriptive of a concept, and at the same time prescriptive in its application. I will never forget the story in Chapter 1 about the man on the subway who could not control his screaming kids (and the point it makes), nor will I ever forget the lighthouse or the wrong jungle or the analogy of the golden eggs. He proved to be a very fine writer, a master of short stories and conceptual wordplay. Covey created a standard operating system-the “Windows”-for personal effectiveness, and he made it easy to use. ![]() Similarly, there had been hundreds of years of accumulated wisdom about personal effectiveness, from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Drucker, but it was never assembled into one coherent, user-friendly framework. But with the Macintosh and then Windows, the mass of people could finally tap the power of the microchip behind the screen. Prior to Apple and Microsoft, few people could harness computers to their daily lives there was no easily accessible user interface-no mouse pointers, friendly icons, or overlapping windows on a screen, much less a touch screen. I think of what he did for personal effectiveness as analogous to what the graphical user interface did for personal computers. Covey himself was a Level 5 teacher, humble about his own shortcomings, yet determined to share widely what he’d learned. ![]()
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