Learning the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Part 1 of many

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A few months ago I started reading the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People from Stephen R. Covey, with the original intention of treating it like any other normal self improvement or leadership book: you read the content, take some notes, forget 90% of it and then use here and there what concept managet to stick in your memory.

After reading the first couple of chapters though I realised I had lost interest, mostly because that default approach to reading was not really working out, and was even in clear discordance with what the author himself recomments. I shifted my attention to other books following my common habit of always having at least one fiction and one non-fiction book in the "Reading In Progress" status until the moment I completely forgot about the book. Or so I thought.

Over the past few weeks I found myself thinking back at this unsuccessful reading experience with a mix of guilt, the impression that I had not taken the right approach when going through it the first time as well as a certain feeling that this was the right moment to pick it up again. I'm going through a phase in life where I'm reflecting a lot about who I am and want to be "when I grow up" and the type of impact I want to have both in myself and in people around me.

Following those reflections, last weekend I finally picked up again The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with a clear intention of approaching it differently than I did in the first attempt; following the recommendation from the book author, I decided I will try to teach the content of the book to someone else as I progress through its chapters as a way to really get to master all the key concepts and get myself in the habit of practicing them. This idea is based on the well known fact that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else: when you are preparing a topic in order to present it or teach it to someone else your brain really focuses on all the important details, and the practice of writing down notes, drawings and such helps your memory reinforcing the bit of information with connections with other pieces of information.

Armed with the best intention I started thinking about to set this up, and it was then when I realised the potential limitations of the sugegsted approach in the current "we're a in a pandemic and not seeing other people very often" type of situation. I could see two options for finding someone to teach the content of the book to while reading it, and none of them felt compelling enough to provide a serious incentive:

• Schedule a set of video calls with a friend or colleague, but hey, I'm not really on the market for scheduling even more video calls these days
• Pick my wife as the lucky winner of yet another "guess who can do it" challenge, but there as well I didn't find I was short of serious topics to discuss with her thanks to our two lovely kids and a recently purchased new house

Both options had the risk of turning into obstacles rather than incentives. Then suddenly one morning in the shower I had the idea: I will scratch this itch by getting started with something else that I had been procrastinating for too long: writing blog articles.

I personally love writing. I used to write a lot when I was younger (or should I just say young?) and I'm much more of a text person than a visual person. These days I use writing very often at work as a tool to help cristallise my thinking, creating clarity for both myself and my peers while allowing anyone — myself included — to go back in time without having to rely solely on our memory, which is well known for being inconsistent and unreliable.

I decided this was a good opportunity to to kill two birds with a stone! Sorry birds out there, I don't really intend to kill any of you, it's just an old expression…

Over the course of the next weeks I'll be writing recurring updates on my progress with the book, taking the teaching part of it to this public forum. I plan to create a post roughly for every chapter in the book, but I really don't want to overthink the process at this stage, since what matters is that I get into a recurring habit of reviewing the content and sharing the main learning here, relying on the peer pressure of, well, the internet… or at least the 2–3 MAUs that will end up reading these lines.

I'm new to Medium as a content producer, therefore I still don't know what are all the possibilities as well as limitations of using this platform for my learning journey. I do wish to make this as interactive as possible, while at the same time not pretending it to be a substitute, not even a surrogate, of the original book. If you are interested in knowing more about The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People I strongly recommend you to buy yourself a copy and start reading it as soon as possible. And while you do so, feel free to come back here to share your comments, insights and recommendation for anyone else that might want to do the same.

You can continue reading in the next article in the series: The Character Ethic and Paradigm Shifts.