Can't remember. I was still at Prudential, still working with Pete Boericke, so it would have been before 1996.
I'd swung by B&N to pick up something to during a lengthy drive. Didn't really have much of a clue about the content, just knew the length of time felt right for how long I expected to be on the road. In that, I was spot on - pulled out of the B&N parking lot as the first sentence was being read, the last one ended as I drove up my friend's driveway.
Remember just sitting there in the car, letting it soak in ~ "Well, that was life-changing."
The 7 Habits... and it's related books have sort of fallen out of style these days, which is regrettable. Of all the books I've read over the past twenty years, it remains the book I'd recommend to someone struggling with getting on a more productive life path.
Until I researched some particulars for this posting, I hadn't realized that Stephen Covey died less than a year ago - July 16, 2012. I learned - too late - that he'd had an online community since 2008. Well, he may be gone, but the influence of his books will be with me always, in ways I could never have imagined as I sat in my car, in the dark, in a friend's driveway, honoring the importance of what I'd just heard.
“Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right.
It's not logical; it's psychological.”
Zowie! This touched something dormant since I was ten years old, when I first saw a subtitled Rashomon on a New York channel's 4:00 p.m. Million Dollar Movie (there wasn't any cable back then, not even UHF - just the three network channels, maybe Channel 12 - but Lach Pitcairn had a big antenna that got NYC stations <Philadelphia of the mid-'60s would never have aired such an esoteric flick>). It was a lesson I really needed to be reminded of in the mid-90s ~ that it's basically impossible to glean the truth of event because people see them through different personal filters. Over the next few years, it was really important that I remember this classic flick & the lesson it sparked in my little kid mind. On an autumn day, driving along interstates & back roads, Covey reminded me.
“...to learn and not to do is really not to learn.
To know and not to do is really not to know.”
It's interesting that I embraced this Covey quote years before I discovered what is now one of my top 10 favorite quotes from Swedenborg (written 200+ years before The 7 Habits...) - "To will and not to do when there is opportunity is in reality not to will; and to love what is good and not do it, when there is opportunity, is not to love." How did I miss that says-it-all quote back in my high school & college religion classes! But that made it even more Ah ha!ish when I came across it back about ten years ago. Says it all, takes away all excuses with its utter simplicity. We have not learned if we do not act from what we've heard or read; we do not know if we do not act from what we claim we've learned.
“Love is a verb."
It's possible that this 4-word sentence resonated with me more than anything else. Love is a verb. I'd said that to Mom for years, from around the time I was married, two years before Covey wrote his book, many more years before I first listened to it. Love is a verb. Love is so much more than words that speak of affection. Love is action. How a person treats someone is way more an expression of love than what they say, or at least that what I believed. And here was someone saying the very thing writ large across my heart - love is a verb.
Sheez - this has not turned out to be the posting I first intended. But I didn't know when I typed in "Genesis" (Beginning) that Stephen Covey was no longer with us, at least the flesh & blood man. His insights, his helping hand, will always be just a book, a cd, a dvd or, yes - cassette, away.
If you've read The 7 Habits... and it affected you like it did me, offer up thanks. If you haven't yet, take the time to read or listen to his powerful lessons in personal change.
Dear Mr. Covey - thank you!
