“It is incredibly easy to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to realize that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
— Stephen R. Covey
I recently attended a course on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which was based on the book of the same name.
It has been more than 10 years since I last read the book. And it made me realize how easy it is to take knowledge for granted, particularly when it comes to self-help. Self-help becomes shelf-help.
The trainer was a great educator. She knew how to not only speak to our minds, but our hearts as well. Throughout the course, she had us do several practical exercises to illustrate her points, so that we might internalize them, and remember them for a lifetime.
There was one exercise that stood out to me most. She gave each of us a piece of paper, and asked us to draw lines according to her instructions.
But in the thick of the chaos, nothing she said made sense. She spoke fast, firing off one instruction after another. And she used fairly complex terms that took us a moment to register — “draw an 80 degree curve, at the top-right corner of the page”, she’d say. “Now sketch a vertical line, 5 centimeters long, just left of the center.”
In my case, I simply thought “whatever the fuck” and just drew anything that came to mind, without making sense of any of the instructions I was hearing.
In the end we were each left to our confusion, as we stared at our nonsensical drawings. There and then, she revealed what she was describing — a simple 2D image of a house on a sunny day.
“How many of you live your day-to-day life like this?” she asked. “Just anxiously fumbling over one line after another, not knowing what your picture is even supposed to look like?”
She was talking about Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind.
People who go on to do significant things in their lives often start with a clear goal of what they want to achieve. They know what their purpose and values are. They know the lasting legacy they want to leave to the world long after they’re dead. And everything they do is guided by this sense of clarity.
I’m sure you’ve had many days where you’re drowning in emails and ad-hoc tasks, jumping between back-to-back meetings, putting out fires as they come. Hell, maybe it’s every day.
You draw the lines, follow instructions, and keep busy — but the picture never quite comes together. You keep moving, but you never stop to think about where the journey is taking you.
Habit 2, like the rest of the Habits, is common sense. But common sense doesn’t mean common practice.
You owe it to yourself to pause and actually think about the picture you’re drawing for yourself. Because if you don’t choose that picture, someone else will.
And it won’t be a pretty one.
Izzat Zailan 