The Fundamental Flaw Undermining The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is packed with powerful ideas, but they are undermined by Covey’s fundamental premises.

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is packed with powerful, actionable behaviors for achieving goals and transforming your life. Unfortunately, the useful ideas it contains are undermined by Covey’s fundamental premises. The book provides a standout example of the essential importance of being critical and paying close attention to the ideas implicit in books on self-improvement and good living, not just their surface-level advice.

7 Habits is a New York Times bestseller and has sold more than twenty-five million copies. Forbes named it “the #1 most influential business book of the twentieth century,” and Time called it one of the twenty-five most influential business management books. Its success even prompted then-U.S. President Bill Clinton to invite Covey to coach him on its principles.

Covey held that our habits “express our character and produce our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.” The book presents seven key habits Covey argued enhance our effectiveness in achieving our goals:

• Being proactive

• Beginning with the end in mind

• Putting first things first

• Thinking win-win

• Seeking to understand before being understood

• Synergizing

• Sharpening the saw

The life-serving value of many of these habits is readily apparent, but they’re things most of us don’t naturally do. We easily lose sight of the long-term goals and deeper values underlying our work, and we commonly approach interactions with others as a zero-sum competition rather than an opportunity for a win-win trade. Covey’s book provides a wealth of frameworks, exercises, and examples that can help us habituate the behaviors he recommends and become more effective at achieving our goals.

That is the essential value 7 Habits purports to offer, but Covey contradicted it in a crucial way in his writing. The book does not advise us to use these tools to advance our own values, but rather to advance what are, in Covey’s view, the fundamental goods: “service,” “fairness,” and “contribution.” This idea—that we should devote our time and effort to others at the expense of ourselves, i.e. the idea of sacrifice—affects how he cashed out every one of his habits. Covey blended this idea with a broader usage of “sacrifice”—giving up one value for something else you value more—with the result that it is often hard to parse apart the parts of his advice that will help you achieve your own goals from the parts that encourage you to give up your goals in order to serve others. 

For example, in explaining the habit of being proactive, he argued that a proactive person should “make love a verb.” Elaborating, he wrote, “Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return.” The purpose of being proactive, in Covey’s view, is not to go out and create and advance the values you hold dear, but to proactively sacrifice those values for others—even people you don’t value or who are harmful to your life. Similarly, his examples for setting a mission statement are focused on sacrificing for others, giving unconditional love, being charitable, and serving God.

The consequence is that 7 Habits collects powerful ideas for effective action and encourages us to use them to sacrifice, rather than serve, our values. Legitimate values are things that enable us to live and flourish—as determined using reason and evidence. Things that are rationally good for our lives are the morally good things to pursue. That idea was alien to Covey, who regarded self interest as fundamentally opposed to morality. Why is Covey’s approach to morality so in contrast with what reason tells us is good for our lives?  

Throughout the book, Covey attempted to justify his “universal correct principles” (e.g. fairness, integrity, and honesty) by claiming that we know they are true without needing evidence. He wrote, “They’re essentially unarguable because they are self-evident. . . . Although people may argue about how these principles are defined or manifested or achieved, there seems to be an innate consciousness and awareness that they exist.” In other words, these principles don’t come from observable evidence or reason, but from some kind of innate knowledge. So what is the source of that knowledge?

This isn’t revealed until the end of the book, which Covey finished with a “personal note” about the “source of correct principles,” saying, “I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the creator and father of us all, is the source of them.” It’s interesting that Covey chose to leave admitting the religious source of his ideas until the very end of the book. Perhaps this was to avoid putting off non-religious readers earlier, so that they might consider accepting his ideas without knowing that they are based on religious faith, not reason and evidence. But this fact undermines all of Covey’s ideas, detaching his notion of the proper goal of a person’s life from that which is actually good for a person in reality. A critical reader will spot this premise in his writing early on, but a reader who looks only at the book’s surface-level, practical advice may not realize the fundamental ideas that are being smuggled in with it.

7 Habits is a great example of why, when reading books on self-improvement and good living, it is vital to pay close attention to the writer’s underlying principles as well as his more concrete suggestions. There is unquestionably a ton of value in 7 Habits. But if you want to use it to serve your life-enhancing goals, you must weed out the book’s inherent mysticism and Covey’s concomitant attachment to the ideals of service and sacrifice and instead apply his habits in service of your own rational values.