Quote

Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.

Stephen Covey

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Stephen Covey
Age: 79 †
Born: 1932
Born: October 24
Died: 2012
Died: July 16
Author
Businessperson
Professor
Writer
Salt Lake City
Utah
Stephen Richards Covey
Around
Driven
Firsts
Putting
First
Value
Executing
Mean
Principles
Organizing
Important
Values
Surrounding
Things
Force
Agendas
Living
Priorities
Means
Forces

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Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.
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The worldly fountain does not breed spiritual depth.
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Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.
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It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.
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An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.
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People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.
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If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.
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Response-ability is the ABILITY to choose our response to any circumstance or condition.
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Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make
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We must never be too busy to take time to sharpen the saw.
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Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.
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We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations
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The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values - carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.
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Being humble does not mean being weak, reticent, or self-effacing. It means recognizing principle and putting it ahead of self. It means standing firmly for principle, even in the fact of opposition.
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Reactive people... are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior.
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Trust is a function of both character and competence. Of course you can't trust someone who lacks integrity, but if someone is honest but they can't perform, you're not going to trust them either. You won't trust them to get the job done.
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We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.
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At some time in your life, you probably had someone believe in you when you didn't believe in yourself.
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In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high.
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