Quotes about Clarity
Just as breathing exercises help integrate body and mind, writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds. Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.
— Stephen Covey
Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
— Stephen Covey
The main thing Is to keep the main thing the main thing.
— Stephen Covey
The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude. It has everything to do with having a wrong map.
— Stephen Covey
Writing crystallizes thinking and distills meaning, and bridges the gap between the conscious and the unconscious.
— Stephen Covey
It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do. And it can finally translate itself into daily activities so that you are proactive, you are in charge of your life, you are making happen each day the things that will enable you to fulfill your personal mission statement.
— Stephen Covey
it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table.
— Stephen Covey
We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first. If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.
— Stephen Covey
But you have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically—to say "no" to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger "yes" burning inside. The enemy of the "best" is often the "good.
— Stephen Covey
"Begin with the end in mind" is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.
— Stephen Covey
You might work on your behavior—you could try harder, be more diligent, double your speed. But your efforts would only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster.
— Stephen Covey
If you visualize the wrong thing, you'll produce the wrong thing.
— Stephen Covey