The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People #7 Sharpen The Saw

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by late Stephen R. Covey, writer of the most-effective personal development book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (first published 1989). One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Grow!

Suppose you were to come upon your neighbor in his garden working feverishly to saw down a tree. “What are you doing?” you ask. “Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply, “I’m sowing down this tree.” “You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?” “Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m super tired! This is hard work.” “Well, why you don’t break for a few minutes and sharpen the saw? I’m sure it would go a lot faster and easier,” you inquire. “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

“Habit 7 is taking time to Sharpen the Saw,” Covey writes. “It surrounds the other habits on the Seven Habits paradigm because it is the habit that makes all the others possible.” He also claims that a person’s nature consists of four (4) dimensions: Physical, Spiritual, Mental, and Social/Emotional. In order to be effective, we must invest some time to renew these dimensions so we can increase our potential in practicing each habit.

Physical Dimension Focuses on improving your health by exercising your body, eating the right kind of foods, and get sufficient rest and relaxation. This way you develop Habit 1 (Be Proactive) muscles of proactivity. The paradigm of yourselves, your self-esteem, your self-confidence and your integrity will be profoundly affected.

Spiritual Dimension Focuses on renewing your spirit by providing leadership to your life. This one develops Habit 2 (Begin With End In Mind). It is your core, your center and your commitment to your value system. For example, by reading, meditating or communicating with nature, you feel renewed, strengthened, centered, and recommitted to serve.

Mental Dimension Focuses on renewing your mental health by continually expanding your mind. This dimension develops Habit 3 (Put First Things First). It is a fact that most of our mental development and study discipline comes through formal education. After it’s finished we don’t explore new subjects and we often become victims of the media and the values taught through them. Wisdom in watching the media requires the effective self-management of Habit 3, which enables you to discriminate and to select the informing, inspiring, and entertaining programs which best serve and express your purpose and values.

Social/Emotional Dimension Focuses on renewing yourself socially by developing meaningful relationships. This dimension helps you to practice Habit, 4, 5, and 6 (Think Win-Win; Seek First to Understand; Synergize) by interacting with other people, finding win-win solutions to your issues, understanding others and synergizing by finding mutually beneficial third alternatives.

Last but not least, BALANCE is the key. As Covey states, “the self-renewal process must include balanced renewal in all four dimensions of our nature: the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the social/emotional. Although renewal in each dimension is important, it only becomes optimally effective as we deal with all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest.”

Sharpen the Saw! Increase Each Habit Potentials!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People #1 Be Proactive

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by late Stephen R. Covey, writer of the most-effective personal development book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (first published 1989). One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Grow!

“Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. You can't keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. Proactive people recognize that they are ‘response-able.’ They don't blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior”
(Stephen R. Covey)

Covey categorizes people into two main groups: the ones that are proactive, and the ones that are reactive:

“Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase… Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization. The negative energy generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.”

So, every one of us has a circle of influence and a circle of concern that both share the same center in our personality. As we encounter each part of the problem, we are to choose on how to react to it. If it is something we can’t fix no matter what, we stop concerning about it and focus on the other parts that we can change.

For example, if we live in a society that is characterized by unemployment, reactive people do nothing at all and being passive to the reality. Proactive people focus on what they can do to improve themselves, create new jobs (or part-time) and be more competitive.

Effective People are Proactive People

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: Failure Is the Way Forward (Chapter 7 Summary)

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

“You can become your own source of inspiration. You can become your own source of motivation. Action is always within reach. And with simply doing something as your only metric for success – well, then even failure pushes you forward”

(Mark Manson)

Manson considers himself extremely fortunate that he graduated college in 2007, right before the job market tanked. After all, if he had never hit rock bottom, he would never have had the courage to start his own online business. Many would have considered freshly graduated Manson to be a failure, but Manson had his own metric of success: for him, giving up on his dreams and accepting a ‘safe’ job would have meant failing. Struggling for a few years with no money was not failing.

Just as there is no happiness without problems, there are no improvements without thousands of tiny failures. After all, children fall thousands of times when learning to walk, but they get back up and try again. Avoiding failure is a learned behaviour, and it is one that we must break ourselves of in order to move forward and improve. Again, this depends on setting good values for ourselves (see previous article) – actions that we take every day to improve our lives.

Embracing failure will often mean suffering pain and discomfort and fear. Manson gives this advice for dealing with fear of failure; when you are stuck on a problem, don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow. Action is not just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of motivation.

Accept that failure and pain are inherent components

of an active life.

Here's to the Crazy Ones, the Unreasonable People

When Steve Jobs launched Apple’s iconic “Think Different” marketing campaign in 1997, it was clearly a reflection of his own philosophy and ideals. He praised “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” Nobody would disagree that Jobs himself personified this category, along with the famous individuals who were featured in Apple’s ads, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Sir Richard Branson, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Ted Turner, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso.

By their nature, radical innovators tend to be contrarians, heretics, revolutionaries. They are forever discontent with the status quo. They are people who challenge conventional thinking, who show no respect for rules, or precedent, or popular opinion, and who never accept “can’t be done.” They dare to defy the deepest-held dogmas, dispute the most established industry practices, and trash the proudest of institutional legacies. Where everyone else seems content to “zig,” they feel compelled to “zag” – to swim against the mainstream, contradict prevailing wisdom, break the accepted patterns, slaughter the sacred cows, question the unquestionable, fix things that “ain’t broke,” turn the seemingly impossible into the possible, and, well… to simply “think different.”

Innovators are not satisfied just playing the game. They have an irresistible itch to rethink it, to change it, to improve it. Or to invent an entirely new game. They are, as George Bernard Shaw once explained, unreasonable people. Shaw argued that “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Rather than conform to the existing patterns of the world, innovators can intuitively see what is wrong with those patterns – where others cannot – and they instinctively want to put them right, or to replace them with their own patterns. They quite literally want to change the world.

In a 1994 interview conducted by the Silicon Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs said the following: “When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much… That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that it – everything around you that you call ‘life’… you can change it, you can influence it… you can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, verses embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Jobs summed it up very well. Innovators don’t just accept that “the world is the way it is.” They are always driven to reshape it into the way they envision it could be. Innovators behave exactly as those “Think Different” ads said they do: “They invent. They imagine… They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Change Your Life: Just Do It!

“A thousand-mile journey begins with a first step”

(Lao-Tzu)

Procrastination – putting things off, dragging one’s feet, unnecessarily postponing what can and needs to be done today – is a pervasive phenomenon. Over 70 percent of college students, for example, identify themselves as procrastinators. The temptation to put things off is understandable, but the price we pay for procrastinating is high – studies show that procrastinators have higher levels of stress, a weaker immune system, poorer sleep, and unsurprisingly, given all of that, lower levels of happiness.

Fortunately, the research into procrastination has also identified practical ways that can help overcome the tendency to procrastinate. The single most important technique is called “the five-minute take-off.” It consists, simply, of starting to do the thing you have been putting off, no matter how little you feel like doing it. Procrastinators often believe that to do something one has to truly want to do it – to be in the right mood, to feel inspired. This is not the case. Usually, to get the job done, it is enough to begin doing it – the initial action kick-starts the process and often brings about more action.

So, for example, if you have difficulty getting yourself to exercise, just make the choice to put on your running shoes and start running: more often than not, the action will reinforce itself. If you have a project that needs to be done, don’t wait for that “right moment.” Choose to act, now! This approach can serve you well on a larger scale too: Commit to your vision, your dream, don’t procrastinate. Find ways to start moving forward the life you want to be living right now.

Don’t procrastinate,

Just do it!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012) Buy this book!

2. Overcoming Procrastination: Or How to Think and Act Rationally in Spite of Life’s Inevitable Hassles by A. Ellis and W.J. Knaus (New York: Signet, 1979)

Nurture Creativity: Steve Jobs said "Creativity is Just Connecting Things"

Picture: Credits to Hugh MacLeod & Vitor Bellote  

“You cannot force creativity to happen—every creative person can attest to that.

But the essence of creativity is making connections and solving puzzles”

(Nancy C. Andreasen, Neuroscientist)

Creativity is connecting things. In other word, making connections where none existed before is what creativity is all about. The world is our field. Thus, there are practically unlimited possible connections that can be made. We are making connections all the time as part of our learning process. For example, a lot of things happen when I’m doing one thing and I’m not thinking about what my mind is doing. I’m either watching movie, I’m reading a book, eating my lunch and then – I make a connection. It may have nothing to do with what I am doing, but somehow or other I see something or hear something or do something, and it pops that connection together. People use to say, millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked, ‘why?’

“Creativity is just connecting things,” Steve Jobs, late CEO of Apple told Wired magazine. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people… Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.”

Jobs told a story when he took calligraphy in college, a course with no practical applications to his life then. But after he came back later he used his knowledge and skills to added Macintoch, the first computer with beautiful typeface, fonts, and calligraphy. The dots were connected. Creativity is connecting things. Can be few years from now, can be months from now, can be in a minute later. So how to connect the dots? Here are my suggestions (at least, these are the things that I do myself):

§  Carry a notebook and keep track of everything – especially in the toilet (sometime I just write ideas on tissue!)

§  Read to add more knowledge. Logically, the more knowledge you have, the more connection you can make.

§  Play or try to experience more things in life. Most of the time, connections just happen when you least expected it.

§  Review the last sermons or scratch or whatever notes you had wrote before. Recalling and reminding are the best way to spark creative connections.

§  Try observation skill. Just look around you and try to make connections between things which may show similarity or maybe totally unrelated.

Don’t just stare the ceiling, make connections.

Don’t just read and play, make connections.

Don’t just eat and sleeping, make connections.

Maybe just relax, and there is a connection!

God, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Barriers of Creativity #4: "Be Practical"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #4: “Be Practical”

            Remember when you suggest something and someone says it’s impractical? Kills your enthusiasm doesn’t it? Unlike any other God’s creations, human beings possess imagination. Our thinking is not limited to the real and present. We can imagine – and imagination is the first step in creative thinking.

            But the problem here is too many people always think of the practicality of things. “Your ideas”, they say, “must be practical.” And practical is what they know until then. We haven’t even tried the idea yet to see whether it works and it is already shot down. Frustrating. But creative people are perseverance and stubborn. They do not give up easily. For them, there is a place for practicality and there is a place for possibility. Remember Mr. Thomas E. Edison? He failed almost a thousand times before he finally invented the incandescent light bulb that evolves into the many type of lights that we’re using now.    

Cultivate your imagination.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

How-To Generate Ideas #9: Brainstorming Crazy Ideas

“The best way to get good idea is to get a lot of ideas” (Linus Pauling)

Brainstorming is about getting as many ideas as possible from a group of people in short time. This is my favorite method. With a marker pen, whiteboard (or a mahjong paper) and imaginations – together we all can create and contribute as many ideas as possible. Ideas just flow and grow.

Dr. Yew Kam Keong in his most recommended book You Are Creative: Let Your Creativity Bloom (3^rd Edition), list out four basic guidelines to follow in brainstorming:

1)    No Criticism. Criticism of any idea expressed is absolutely forbidden.

2)    No Evaluation. There should not be any evaluation of ideas during the idea generation stage. Participants are encouraged to say whatever comes into their mind without self-censorship. In fact the slogan is “The crazier, the better.”

3)    Quantity of Idea. The very essence of brainstorming is to get as many ideas as possible. Quantity is more important than quality.

4)    Cross-Fertilize. Participants are encouraged to combine or modify any of the ideas expressed to come out with new ideas. There should not be any individual ownership of any specific ideas. Instead, there should be group ownership.

 

During the session of brainstorming, crazy ideas are very welcome. Never be afraid to sound foolish. Only be afraid if you don’t contribute at all. Try not to think too logic. Be free to use your imagination, fantasy and visualization. Be creatively free! “Generally,” writes Dr. Yew, “crazy ideas by themselves are not useful. They are meant for triggering off innovative ideas, which are ultimately practical.” By the way, you also can do brainstorm individually. Just let your ideas flow.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)