The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Literary Elements

Self-help, productivity, business

Modern (1980s) United States, although it is still quite applicable in today's world

The book is written from the first-person perspective of Stephen Covey, an author with a profound insight into human psychology.

Matter-of-fact, hopeful, encouraging

Protagonist: the reader who takes Covey's advice and transforms his/her character instead of subscribing to the "personality ethic." Antagonist: the naturally sinful elements of human nature, along with the books that promote the "personality ethic" instead of the "character ethic."

Covey recognizes a major conflict in self-help books between those written prior to 1920 and those written afterward. The former encourage the development of character in order to achieve the desired ends, while the latter purport to skip this hard work and jump straight to the results without the hard work, a trend that is detrimental to culture. His Seven Habits are intended to rectify this by growing one's character while bringing him/her to interdependence rather than just independence.

After describing the habits needed to transition to interdependence, Covey finishes the book by exhorting the readers not to become lax in their victory, but continually renew and refresh their good habits, not allowing their character growth to reverse and deteriorate.

The problem Covey details at the beginning of the book foreshadows his eventual plan to coach the reader into fixing the problem on a personal level with his Seven Habits.

“Through a printing error, the map labeled "Chicago" was actually a map of Detroit. Can you imagine the frustration, the ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination?” (The Power of a Paradigm)

Covey alludes to many external people, places, and objects throughout the book, which is understandable given its nature. Such allusions include those to Sir Isaac Newton, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Albert Einstein, the Psalms, Chicago, Detroit, IBM, Henry David Thoreau, and Star Wars, among many others.

Covey uses the image of a quadrant as a visual aid for sorting through tasks that must be completed in an attempt to prioritize and categorize. The axes of this box are urgency and importance: the important and urgent tasks must be done immediately, while the important, non-urgent tasks may be planned for. The unimportant urgent tasks can be delegated to someone else, while the unimportant and non-urgent tasks may be completely eliminated. This imagery serves as a helpful tool for a reader's prioritization.

The self-help books published since 1920 claim to fix the problem with a minimum of effort required to achieve a maximum profitable yield. Their effects, however, are paradoxical; instead of helping, they actually exacerbate the problem by sticking a Band-Aid over the wound instead of sanitizing and closing it.

By intent, Covey's approach to self-help parallels that of the books written before 1920, including Benjamin Franklin's autobiography: the road to interdependence as achieved through the building up of one's character.

“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” - Henry David Thoreau

“But we enjoyed golden eggs, too, as the goose -- the quality of the relationship -- was significantly fed.” (Three Kinds of Assets)