Today
is Day Two of Week Seven of the Omer. That is Forty-four Days of the
Omer. The Theme is: Seven Principles
We’re in the seventh and last week of Counting the Omer, and the
last week of my offering daily thoughts.
Therefore, as I wrote yesterday, I’m going to use these days by going
back to one of my favourite themes: one
which, since I learned it and adopted it in my own life, has been nothing short
of life-changing in a very positive way.
And that is, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by the
late Dr. Stephen Covey. From the
title, and given the way that the literary world classifies it, one might think
that Seven Habits is just another business, or self-help book. To be sure it is both, but it is much, much
more. It is nothing short of a way of
life, a way of looking at the things that we do – whatever our life’s endeavour
– and making ourselves more effective by providing a structure within which we
can inject our own core values into what we do.
The Seven Habits are intended to help us make systematic that
which we cling to on a philosophical level.
As I wrote yesterday, my intent is not that this series of brief thoughts
on the Habits would substitute for reading the book. Rather, my prayer is that it would spur you
to buy and read the book if you haven’t already. And if you already have read it, that my
thoughts would provide a little refresher to help you to re-centre your life
around the Habits. I am so
completely sold on The Seven Habits, that I dedicated an entire High
Holy Days Sermon Series to them. If you’re
interested, you can read them on this blog by looking in the archives for
September 2013.
The Second Habit is Begin with
the End in Mind. Look, this Habit,
like all the Habits, is not, as they say, ‘Rocket Science.’ The elegance of The Seven Habits is in
their simplicity, the ease with which even I can look at them and ask, Why
haven’t I been doing this all my life? But
the truth is that most of us have not being doing these things all our
lives – not because they aren’t absolutely intuitive, rather because we allow
ourselves to get sidestepped, our attentions diverted to other matters. And that certainly would include this Second
Habit.
How much energy have you wasted in
your life, but just diving into a project without taking some time to visualise
its final form, its outcome? I know that
I have, so I’m assuming you have also.
We fail to achieve our goals for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, but less often than we claim, they
were just beyond our reasonable capability.
Sometimes, we really had no strong commitment to the goal and therefore
didn’t give it our all. There are other possible
reasons. All of us have failed in something,
and it is not a shame to fail. Even
the most successful people often fail at one endeavour or another. But one reason, which is often to blame and
which we can control far more easier than most, is that we spent time and
energy flailing about rather than thinking out a plan and putting it into
effect.
Begin with the End in Mind doesn’t mean that one must be a slave to one’s original plan. Often circumstances will either come up or
come to light having been present all along, that make sticking to the original
plan a folly. Of course we must see
to our plans with the flexibility to adjust to unforeseen circumstances. But if we didn’t have a solid plan that was
focused on the desired results from the beginning, chances are we wasted
time, energy and other resources.
The key, then is to make the best
plan you can, but be ready to change if it makes sense to do so. I can’t tell you how many times in my life,
this Habit was served me well. It
will you, too. Those who don’t grasp, or
don’t embrace this Habit, find themselves constantly spinning their
wheels. I don’t know about you, but I
just don’t think that I have the luxury of time to spend, spinning my
wheels. If I’m going to fail in
something because I set my sights too high, or because I didn’t count on every
possible impediment from the start, then if I’ve begun with the end in mind it
is much easier to adjust along the way.
There’s an old cliché, if you
fail to plan, you plan to fail and as with most clichés there is much truth
in it. And Begin with the End in Mind
is related. If we can visualise what
the desired result would be, then we are in a better position to plan, and
succeed.
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