Some books you read once and they are done with you.
A smaller number are never done with you, and you find yourself back inside them every few years, discovering that the book has somehow changed while it sat on the shelf.
Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is the second kind. I first read it at twenty-five or twenty-six, a young Financial Adviser at New York Life who picked it up hoping, if I am honest about it, for technique: better ways to open a conversation, better ways to be persuasive.
What I got instead was a paradigm shift, a phrase Mr. Covey borrowed from the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and put into everybody's mouth, and I have written before about how that idea rearranged me. The discovery that the way I saw the world was itself the thing that needed changing.
But that first reading only got me through the front door of this book. It has been closer to twenty years now, and I keep coming back, and every time I come back a different chapter stands up and introduces itself as the one I was not ready for last time.
That is what I want to write about here. Not a summary of the seven habits, which you can find anywhere, but the three or four rooms in this book that took me years to be able to enter at all.
The Funeral Exercise
Habit 2 is "begin with the end in mind," and Mr. Covey opens it with an exercise that most readers, I suspect, skim politely and move past.
He asks you to imagine your own funeral, three years from now, at which four people will speak: someone from your family, a friend, someone from your work, and someone from your church or community. Now write down, honestly, what you would want each of them to say about you. That, he says, is your actual definition of success, and everything else you have been calling by that name is borrowed.
At twenty-five I skimmed it politely and moved past. What did I know? I had quotas to think about.
I can't skim it anymore, and here is why. I run senior care homes, and part of this work, the part nobody puts in the brochure, is that I attend funerals: residents I have known, joked with, sung to, and argued gently with about whether it was time to come to lunch.
I have sat in the pews at their services and listened to what actually gets said at the end of a life. And what gets said?
Nobody, not once, has stood up at a funeral and talked about the deceased's productivity. Nobody mentions the quarterly numbers, or the square footage of the house. They tell the story of a kindness instead. They describe how the person made them feel when he walked into a room. They quote some small silly phrase he always used to say, and the whole church laughs and cries at the same time, and that phrase turns out to have been the man's real estate, the thing he actually built and left behind him.
So when Mr. Covey says begin with the end in mind, I no longer hear a visualization exercise. I have SEEN the end. I see it professionally.
And the strange gift of this work is that the end keeps correcting my definition of success in real time, every time I am tempted to trade a resident's afternoon for a spreadsheet, every single time the urgent tries to eat the important. Most people have to imagine the funeral. I only have to pay attention at the ones I attend, and then drive home and ask myself whether the man I was that day is the man I would want spoken about.
The Two Circles
Habit 1, "be proactive," contains the drawing that has probably done more quiet work in my life than any diagram ever printed. Two circles, one sitting inside the other.
The big one is the circle of concern, and into it goes everything you care about and everything that worries you: the economy, the diagnosis, the election, the thing your brother said at Christmas. The small one inside it is the circle of influence, which holds the part you can actually do something about.
Mr. Covey's observation is simple and a little brutal. Reactive people live out in the outer ring, pouring their energy into things they cannot move, and their circle of influence shrinks accordingly. Proactive people work the inner circle only, and theirs grows.
I know of no better job than mine for testing that idea daily, because dementia is the outer ring made flesh.
I can't stop the disease. The families can't stop it either, and God knows they have tried harder than anybody. The progression, the diagnosis, the sheer unfairness of it, all of that sits out in the circle of concern, enormous and immovable, and a person who stares at it long enough will drown in it.
But this afternoon is in the inner circle.
The music from the years when a resident was young is in the circle. Whether she is met with argument or with warmth when she asks for her mother, who has been gone forty years, is entirely and completely in the circle. I have watched caregivers transform a person's whole day with what sits inside that small ring, while the big ring stayed exactly as dark as it was before.
So when people ask how we do this work without despairing, what can I tell them? The truest answer I have is Mr. Covey's drawing. We keep our eyes on the inner circle. It is bigger than it looks.
The Emotional Bank Account
The idea from this book I used every single day as a Financial Adviser, without fully understanding it until years afterward, is the emotional bank account.
Every relationship, Mr. Covey says, carries a balance, and the deposits into it are unglamorous things: small kindnesses, kept promises, honest apologies, and actually listening when you would rather be talking. The withdrawals are broken commitments, half-attention, and all the little discourtesies we assume nobody notices.
And the account balance, rather than your eloquence, is what determines how much the relationship can survive.
As a young adviser I learned the surface version of this, which is that people don't care what you know until they know you care. It is an old line and it happens to be true.
But the deeper version, the one Habit 5 is getting at when Mr. Covey says seek first to understand and then to be understood, took me until this career to actually learn. Because most listening, mine very much included for a lot of years, is not listening at all. It is reloading. It is waiting with intent to reply, running your own answer while the other person finishes making sounds.
Mr. Covey calls the real thing empathic listening, getting so far inside another person's frame that you could argue their position better than they can, and he says it is the single biggest deposit you can make into anybody's account.
Memory care taught me the final-exam version of that lesson. I sit with residents whose words are leaving them, so that the sentences come out with pieces missing, or with the wrong pieces, and the temptation, which you feel physically in your chest, is to fill in and correct and hurry the whole thing along.
But slow all the way down, listen to the feeling underneath the broken sentence instead of to the sentence itself, and the person is almost always perfectly clear.
She is not asking about the bus schedule. She is telling you she feels unsafe. He is not really asking what day it is; he is asking whether he still matters to anyone. Understand first, and you can answer the real question.
I learned empathic listening from a business book, and I now use it every day with people who can no longer read one. Life is funny that way, and also not funny at all.
The Saw I Keep Forgetting to Sharpen
And now I owe Mr. Covey some honesty, in both directions.
What I owe him first is a confession. Habit 7 is "sharpen the saw," the discipline of renewing yourself physically, mentally, spiritually and relationally, on the grounds that you are the instrument, and an instrument that is never maintained eventually cannot cut anything at all. He tells the story of a man sawing for hours, exhausted and making no progress, who refuses to stop and sharpen the saw because he is too busy sawing.
I have been that man for entire quarters of my life.
I preach energy management, I have written about it on this very blog, and I still catch myself running on four cylinders through weeks that deserved eight, telling myself I will rest after the next thing. And is there ever not a next thing? Twenty years with this book and Habit 7 is still the one that has to keep tapping me on the shoulder. Granted, I am better than I was. But the saw is duller than I like to admit, more often than I like to admit it.
What I owe him second is the criticism, which is mild but real. This book is a product of 1989 and it reads like one: dense, corporate around the edges, longer than it needs to be, with diagrams and matrices that can make plain wisdom feel like a training seminar.
And its most famous prescription, the personal mission statement, carries a quiet risk Mr. Covey never quite dwells on, which is that the statement can become the achievement.
I wrote mine years ago. I worked hard on it. I have no idea where it is.
And I have come to believe that is fine, because the writing of it did the work, meaning the weeks of asking myself what I was actually for, and the laminated card was never the point in the first place. A mission statement you have to consult is a mission you have not absorbed yet. The document is scaffolding, and at some point the building has to stand up on its own. Isn't that the whole test of any idea worth keeping?
But notice what I am criticizing, which is the packaging and never the load-bearing walls. Thirty-seven years on, the center of this book holds completely: character over personality, the inner circle over the outer, deposits before withdrawals, understanding before being understood, and the end in mind before the day in motion.
So which one are you actually working on?
In any case, I know the real reason I keep growing back into this book. At twenty-five I read it in order to become effective, which is the word in the title and the very least of what it teaches, and the book was patient with me. It waited while I chased technique, waited while I built careers, and waited until my work had put me in the pews at enough funerals to finally hear what Habit 2 had been saying the entire time.
Begin with the end in mind.
I know the end now. I have seen it up close, many times, and it has made me sure of very few things and very sure of those. At the end they will not read out your numbers. They will say how you made them feel, and whether you kept your promises, and what it was you always used to say.
I would like the people at mine to tell the truth. And I am trying, day by day and inner circle by inner circle, to live in such a way that the truth is kind.
