10 Habits of Highly Effective People

PREFACE

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onsider it delivered" the reply came through via a text message, having messaged a man I was acquainted with. I needed to get my message across to a certain secretary, having turned down a job offer I could not take on. The same man had earlier proved instrumental to my efforts in a government project where I had been a Presiding Officer and needed certain equipment procured. Needing to pass my message across to the secretary, I thought he might be a conduit worth the effort; although my means was unorthodox, I rested assured.

The aforementioned dictum is an assurance not unusual of effective people. When they set targets, they achieve them; running a business, they succeed; competing, they win! They may be deemed naturally witty, favored, gifted or sagacious eggheads capable of performances that seem talismanic. Effectiveness, however, is a product and superset of multiple constituents, executed and maintained in harmony.

Someone wanted to sell a TV set, it was getting antiquated and needed repairs, he also wanted to unclog his apartment of many other things he didn’t need. The problem, however, was getting an effective marketer good enough to sell an old and broken appliance; he called up the best guy he thought of, handed it to him and laid back waiting for his money to come. A while later, the marketer turned up looking unhappy. He told the owner that his clientele wouldn’t even take the TV as scrap; neither it nor its components were considered important, the product was regarded as refuse. It was a very tough sell pushing a broken, tube TV in a time where 8K HDR flat-screen TVs and laser displays where the rage. Failing to sell the TV he went on to ask reimbursement for the car fuel he burned driving about.

Seeing this, a different but effective marketer took up the task and pitched the same old, broken TV to his clientele. Having done his thing and presented the merchandise his own way, a client bought the dead TV, a smaller TV in the house, an aging satellite decoder, another aging electric stabilizer and a faulty chair, all for a thousand more than what the seller had originally asked for them—It was a sweeping sale.

Buoyed by a desire to net goals, get results or avert repercussions, the effective may bewilder in the efficacy or zest with which they get results. In many spheres of human endeavor, it is often of more primacy to achieve slated or envisioned targets, without which a business may flounder, relationships may deprecate or errands might prove wasteful. The quality of being effective is hence a coveted virtue by many a business or venture partner, in this light, it behooves all concerned to imbibe effectiveness as requisite. Such an effort, however, may prove the attainment of effectiveness without a systematic, thorough approach, more elusive or convoluted than anticipated.

People may see the results, hear about the achievements or even behold the clout and ambience of greatness that come with being effective, but not as many may be privy to the fact that some things they know about some of the most effective people they are familiar with or emulate are contingent on the individual’s way of doing things, moderated, molded and patterned by a set of personal habits. Sometimes, people may be oblivious to the details underpinning their favorite role model’s achievements; some may know that to get certain things, one would be required to have or imbibe some other things but at the same time might be ignorant as to what the prerequisites are for good effectiveness.

Being effective transcends personal efficiency, it encapsulates the optimization of personal efforts to achieve goals and targets with as much or as many resources as necessary, and as little cost as possible, leveraging powerful personal habits.

In just about any given sphere of endeavor, individual performance can be nuanced, depending on the person, their natural gifts and the details of the task at hand. As much as we may find it important, being effective isn’t an innate aptitude for everyone; it is partly in cognizance of the constraints a well-meaning individual’s effort at cultivating effectiveness might face that this book was written.

Within the pages of this book are unveiled invaluable insight and wisdom nuggets proven to ennoble and optimize human effort and the attainment of both individual and corporate objectives in whatever worthy sphere they might be needed.

The personal habits unfolded herein have been distilled from decades of scrutiny and study of the ways of mankind in varying spheres. From politicians to academics to rural farmers and professional soldiers, timeless lessons garnered embody what you are about to read.

Regardless of age or circumstance, the underpinning denominators of personal effectiveness are often remarkably correlated as are some of their outcomes; such denominators are the crux of the rubric 10 Habits of Highly Effective People.

1

PLAN

Designs for Effectiveness

I

F YOU UNDERSTAND it, living life is in many ways comparable to building a house; you are going to need a structured approach to achieve some targets, failure to which you might build a crumbly house or no house at all. As people live out life, they are executing a plan, whether they are mindful of this or not; such a plan may be well organized or it may be a patchwork of impulse-driven endeavors.

It is to be observed that planning inherently infuses efficiency into some ventures which would otherwise turn out differently had a different approach been employed. Effective people are of necessity plan makers who often scrutinize the big picture to see if their designs ultimately lead to where they envision them to.

To inculcate personal effectiveness, one would be required to set out designs or plans that encompass some undertakings, such plans can span the dimensions of time, space, energy and other resources.

An old friend was telling me about the father of a mutual friend, the man worked in an oil company and was reasonably rich.

This man, however, had a problem with the design of his house; it appeared he was never contented with the idea of his house lacking some fancy feature he liked. As a result, whenever he visited his friends and saw some structure in their home, a particular architectural design he admired or some other building feature he liked, he would go back home and have construction workers demolish his house and rebuild it the way he saw it done in his friend’s house. After a while, when he goes out again and sees another building design or feature in someone else’s house he would go back home and have construction workers demolish a section of his home again so they can rebuild it to look like what he saw in another person’s house. After this when he sees yet another feature somewhere he would come home and repeat the same thing.

This man’s wife had an acquaintance whose husband had a related but nuanced problem; he had a knack for wanting to do things himself instead of shelling out money for professionals to do it.

He was virtually his own architect—a mistake seeing he was a veterinary doctor and not a construction professional. He designed his own house next to a huge church and had his bedroom windows opening into the church’s compound, his children’s bedrooms were adjacent to the church’s toilet, there was no backyard, a small door for a gate and no sewage drain.

When his family took a bath the water and scum would flow out and settle right in front of the neighbor’s door. The result, the neighbor took him to court and the church board called him to seal off his windows. The problem compounded because his house had already been built, restructuring the building would cost him far more than he would want to spend. If only he had gotten it right the first time.

Both of those men have a common problem that revolves around a plan. The cost of readjusting and correcting the design of their properties is a testament to the primacy of laying out optimized designs before embarking on significant ventures. The analogy, however, transcends real estate or infrastructure; it’s in fact fundamentally personal to the individuals involved.

An ambitious young man ventured out to a city in search of a better life, he was meaning to succeed and hopefully marry. This, however, wasn’t to be as he ran into problems with the friend he was living with. He frequented night clubs and went about living on the streets, running out of money and starving he moved in with a girl he met in that city. She helped him tremendously, and he finally thought he had found Mrs. Right.

Living aimlessly and trying to settle, he discovered that his wife-to-be was engaged to another. Jarred by her decision to leave him, he asked why, and she pointedly told him among other things that he had no plan. She left because she didn’t see a man with a plan, she needed stability and the fellow was egregiously lacking. He lost her to another and had to move out to get his own place. His original decision to leave home was poorly planned.

To plan as requisite, people may need to ask pertinent questions about their lives and the businesses they are here on earth to accomplish, from the answers to those, they can set up plans or draft designs that ultimately serve to optimize the achievement of their purposes in life. Such a plan may or may not be written down; it may be a mental picture, stored in memory and frequently remembered.

Effective people always have plans they are working out, plans detailed with a road map of what things the individual is out to achieve and that will ultimately lead to the fulfilment of their overall plan.

The cost and requirements of plans are to be evaluated in line with reality before the commencement of execution. Sometimes, bigger or long-term plans may be regarded as super plans whose constituent elements can themselves be clustered into smaller plans. For instance, a young person may say they want to get a PhD by age forty; that is a long-term plan, stretching over many years. The person may then break that down into other smaller plans like, get a degree; get a job; get married; get a master’s degree; get some more money; and finally; go for a PhD program. Each of these can be seen as a plan on its own, a plan which makes the next plan much more convenient to achieve, until the ultimate plan to Get a PhD is finally achieved. In-between those plans, many other plans may also be designed to tackle routines and tasks effectively.

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Depending on the individual’s prevailing circumstances, two people with the same plan might differ in the fine details of what entails their plan, what is important, however, is that they have a plan—a detailed plan where others do not. They have a plan where others simply do what their friends do or what another man or woman suggests they do. People who lack effectiveness seldom have a detailed plan they are executing.

Think of a plan as it were a map or a schematic whose sole purpose is to optimize the achievement of a goal. I have found that often when I have issues making progress; the root of such was found in my not having a plan comprehensive enough to aid a smooth execution of what I had in mind to do. Taking the time to design a proper course of action, whether such is written down or mentally arranged can foster the attainment of one’s objectives by no small measure.

It’s not unusual to find individuals to whom the idea of laying out plans for just about every endeavor a person would want to venture into is alien. Looking at things in the world, it’s not altogether surprising why many such people don’t take the idea of planning actions in advance seriously. Such people simply learn to live life as things or situations would have them live it—to adapt and to take action over matters as they turn up or as someone else would suggest they do.

You may yet find another grouping of people, an assemblage which, although they may make an effort to plan for things in advance, they don’t plan far enough into the future or detailed enough to encompass obvious possible impediments to the executions of their plans. Again, you may find others who, despite the best of intentions and taking the time to lay out a relatively much more thorough plan for doing things of interest, leave out the inclusion of a contingency plan.

Whether the problem is an absence or near-absence of a plan, a sparse or loosely designed plan, a short-sighted plan or one without a fallback, people who go about living life without recourse to appropriate planning should not expect to excel at their purposes as they would if they had and executed a robust, well-thought-out and balanced plan in the first place—a plan to which they adhere.

THE PRIMACY OF PLANNING

An in-depth look at the nature of the operations that abound in daily activities and purposes in life would reveal, that the ordering of such processes makes clear the fact that some things can only come after others or before others and not superimposed or done alongside others. Other things, however, more readily lend themselves to superimposition and can be done alongside other things. For instance, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, but you can’t be gulping down a drink and talking at the same time.

When processes are ordered, or rather optimized in line with existing rules or laws of propriety, those become inherently more efficient because to do otherwise would amount to going against the grains, so to speak.

There is this story about a starving man who went into an eatery to help himself, he placed an order but was told only rice was available and that the stew was yet undone. Famished, he ordered the plain rice. When he was done eating, he was told that the stew was now ready, not willing to forgo the stew he ordered that too. When it was brought, he drank or rather gulped down the stew, dropped the dish, lay on the ground having his back to the floor and began gyrating and shaking—as happens when one is mixing two different drinks in one wine glass. When asked what he was doing, the man said he was making sure the rice and stew mixed properly—as they should have if he had eaten them at the same time.

This fellow went against the grain so to speak, in his eating a bowl of rice first, then later on eating or drinking a stew that became available after he had finished eating the rice and was now trying to mix the two in his stomach. Many people in life, approach their purposes a lot like this fellow who is trying to mix different