This is an excerpt from one of Stephen Covey’s final interviews as recorded in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I love that he talks about the importance of sticking to principles in the midst of massive changes that have occurred and continue to occur. I thought that way long before I ever considered reading the book, which is why it’s one of my personal favorites. Without further ado, here is his answer to a question about things that have changed since the book was first published:
Change itself has changed. It’s accelerated beyond anything any of us ever imagined. Technological revolutions seem to occur hourly. We grapple with economic uncertainty. global power relations shift dramatically and over night. And much of the world is terror-stricken, both psychologically and literally.
Our personal lives have radically changed too. The pace of life is now light speed. We are connected to work 24/7. We used to try to do more with less; now many of us are trying on our own to do everything at once.
But one thing hasn’t changed and never will change – the only thing you can rely on – the fact that there are timeless and universal principles. They never change. They apply everywhere in the world at all times. Principles like fairness, honesty, respect, vision, accountability, and imitative govern our lives in the same way that natural laws like gravity dictate the consequences of falling off a building. If you go over the edge, you fall. It’s a natural principle.
And that’s why I am fundamentally optimistic. I am an optimist because I believe in changeless principles. I know that if we live by them, they will work for us.
Unlike a rock that falls if dropped from a building, we are capable of choosing whether to jump or not. We are not unconscious beings to be merely pulled or pushed around by impersonal forces. As humans, we are endowed with the gifts of conscience, imagination, self-awareness, and independent will. These are amazing gifts that animals do not possess. We can sense right from wrong. We can stand apart from ourselves and evaluate our own behavior. We can live our of our imagination, the future we wish to create, instead of being held hostage by the memory of our past. And the more we exercise these endowments the greater becomes our freedom to choose. We can choose to make principles work for us or against us. I revel in that ability to choose.
To live with such change, we need principles that don’t change.
But there’s a problem. Too many of us – more than ever, I’m afraid – are trying to take a shortcut around the principles of life. We want love but not commitment. We want success without paying the price. We want thin bodies and our cake too. In other words, we want something we can never have – the rewards of good character without good character.
That’s why I wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I believe that our culture is drifting from its anchor in those principles, and I want to point to the consequences – that neglecting principles can only result in the shipwreck of our lives. In like manner, I promise you that in the long run, if you will live in alignment with principles you will prosper, personally and professionally.