After writing “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, Steven Covey wrote “The 8th habit”. I wish he instead wrote the book titled “The 0th habit”

Covery mentioned 0th habit in the first chapter – “inside-out” of “7 habits… “, when he wrote –

“It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.

In the words of Thoreau, ‘For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root’. We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work at the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow”.

The seven habits are about attitudes and behaviors. The paradigm itself is touched upon in the first chapter (with some beautiful examples though), but left there.

Covey did recognize (see quote above), that it is the paradigm shift that would result in quantum change while seven habits (attitudes and behaviors) would contribute to only minor changes, but he perhaps did not truly comprehend the full significance of his own finding and thereby the book titled “The 0th habit” does not exist.

Paradigm shift is nothing but essentially aligning the beliefs with reality, which was the post I shared recently. It is easier said than done. It goes into both looking inside and truly understanding yourself and looking outwards to understand the world rationally – not being biased by one’s personal beliefs. Needless to say, both these tasks have considerable challenges.

So the fact remains…

One of the best gifts a person can give to herself /himself is to recognize the need for paradigm shift and then to actually generate the courage and make changes at that level – but as things stand, it also remains as one of the hardest things!

There are numerous books and material on this topic, including some of my blogs which I will be sharing separately.

Neeraj

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