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Foundations

More than a half century ago, a music executive in London was invited to listen to a new group of four guys who sang and played the guitar. He listened for a while and then shrugged them off. He decided not to offer them a recording contract. “Groups of guitars are on their way out,” he said, and turned down what would become the most popular band in history, a band that would go on to sell more than a billion recordings—the Beatles.

Today, it seems incredible that anyone in their right mind would turn down the Beatles. So why did this executive do it? The results you get in life flow from the things you do, which in turn flow from the way you see things. We call this the See-Do-Get Cycle. The music executive saw a world in which groups of guitars were losing popularity, so what did he do? Naturally, he turned down the Beatles. And what did he get as a result? Well, he didn’t get to sell a billion recordings.

Again, the results you get in life flow from the things you do, which in turn flow from the way you see things. For example, if you see hard work as the key to success in life, what will you do? You’ll probably work harder than most people. And what will be your reward? Most likely you’ll achieve what you’re working toward—a degree, a good job, a great family, whatever means success for you. And even if you don’t get all the rewards you want out of your work, you’ll be a lot further down the road toward achieving your goals than those other people who don’t work as hard as you did.

The See-Do-Get Cycle is at work in your life all the time. For example, if you see your professor as a jerk, you’ll probably ignore his lectures and glare at him during class. What result will you get? Not much learning.

Clearly, what you See is what you Get in life. If you See yourself as a loser, you’ll probably lose. If you See yourself as a confident person who can succeed with the right kind of help, you probably will succeed. The way you see things is called your paradigm. Other words for paradigm are mindset, perception, belief system, frame of reference, or point of view. Your brain is packed with paradigms. You have political, religious, moral, racial, and social paradigms. You have paradigms about sports, music, art, movies, parents, drugs, sex, dating, studying, drinking, careers, and college. Lots of paradigms are in our heads about ourselves, other people, and the world in general.

Here are a few everyday paradigms people often have that work against them:

“I’m not cut out for college.”

“I’m not a morning person, so I can’t get to class on time.”

“I’m no good at sports.”

“I can’t dance.”

“Study groups are a pain.”

Of course, none of these paradigms are really true—they’re just beliefs.

Your paradigms are like lenses through which you view the world. If you see college through positive lenses, you will see it as a great opportunity to build lifelong friendships, tap into brilliant minds, and prepare yourself for a meaningful career. But if you look at college through negative lenses, you’ll see it as an annoying barrier to getting a good job. You will see exams as meaningless games and schoolwork as a waste of time. So, your paradigms of college matter a lot.

A paradigm is a mental map. Suppose a friend texts you a map on the first day of school and tells you it’s a map of the campus. Running late, you whip out your phone and start making your way to class. Fifteen minutes later, frustration hits. Nothing makes sense. Only then do you realize that your very funny friend has given you the wrong map. Hilarious. So, even if you try really hard and think positive, that map won’t help you find your class.

If you have the wrong mental maps, you’re not going to make it to your destination. You’ve got to have accurate paradigms of what college requires of you—how to write a paper or take a test, how to get along with others, how to work in study groups, and so forth. If you start now in getting the right mental map of your college experience—of what it takes to succeed—you can avoid all kinds of costly delays and emotional breakdowns.

The same is true of your life. What are your paradigms of success, of how to use your time, of what life is all about? You can save yourself a lot of grief in the coming years if you examine your paradigms and work to make the off-target ones as accurate as possible.

So, what is your paradigm of school? Of your future? Of yourself?

Your most important paradigm is your paradigm of yourself. For Brianna, a student at New York University, the first year of college was a major shock. She was stunned by the huge workload. It seemed like everyone was smarter than she was. “I just knew that I wouldn’t ever be able to keep up,” she said. Despite that crippling mindset, she kept trying. Fortunately, Brianna’s midterm tests brought a pleasant wake-up call: She discovered that she had managed to keep up with her class after all. “At that point, it began to dawn on me,” she said, “that I could compete, and that I could do even better if I stepped up my effort.” And she did. She worked harder, and, at semester’s end, she had scored better than average in each of her classes. But the biggest payoff for Brianna was her new self-paradigm. She no longer saw herself as a loser.

So, if you say, “I’m not the college type; it’s just not me,” is that really true? Or have you just talked yourself into believing it? I’ll bet it’s a paradigm, and a paradigm is not reality. You can change a paradigm, the way Brianna did. Sometimes it just means that you keep trying. When a person’s paradigm changes, it’s called a Paradigm Shift. If you’ve come straight out of high school, college can be a massive Paradigm Shift, especially if you’ve moved away from home. People talk differently and behave differently—and nobody tells you what to do. Or maybe you’ve been working at a job for years and you’re going back to school to get a degree. Another big Paradigm Shift! School might not be what you remember. You might be stunned that you have to work harder and longer than you would on the job. You might find you’re older than some of your teachers.

“Going to college was the scariest thing I’ve done,” said Marisol, who had never finished school. “We had three kids and I had a job. But when I looked at who got laid off at work and who didn’t, I saw school was the important differentiator. I needed that degree.” So, she went back. She said, “The first thing I noticed was that college isn’t high school. It was a big adjustment to be in class with people younger than me. I felt so old! But then I got into it and nobody seemed to care how old I was. Plus, I was paying for it, so I cared a lot more!”

So, you act according to your paradigms—the way you see things—in everything you do. Your paradigm of other people impacts how you make friends. Your paradigm of alcohol impacts how much—or if—you drink. Your paradigm of grades impacts how much you study. Your paradigms drive what you DO every day.

Now, what you repeatedly do is called a habit, like brushing your teeth, texting in class, or waking up late.

Do you have a string of ineffective habits, like gaming for ten hours a day or habitually putting other people down?

DID YOU KNOW?

The Top 10 Bad Habits (from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Breaking Bad Habits)

1.Lying

2.Being late

3.Forgetting and other acts of carelessness

4.Knuckle cracking

5.Belching and passing gas

6.Obsessing over orderliness

7.Being unable to make a commitment

8.Being a skinflint (cheapskate)

9.Procrastinating

10.Cigarette smoking

Where do your habits come from? From your paradigms. Too often people try to change their habits without changing their paradigms. What are the most popular New Year’s resolutions? They are, first, lose weight; second, pay off debts; and third, quit smoking. They are also the resolutions that get broken the most. Why? Because people try to change their habits rather than the paradigms that drive their habits. They try dieting and they fail because the paradigm is “starve yourself.” Maybe they need to adopt a new paradigm, like “I feel better when I exercise.”

In any case, if you want to make big, quantum improvements in your effectiveness, you need to work on changing your paradigms. Just as how you See things impacts what you Do, what you Do ultimately impacts what you Get.

Let me illustrate using a well-known fable, Aesop’s tale of The Goose and the Golden Egg. A poor farmer wakes up one day to find that his goose has miraculously laid an egg of pure gold. Delighted, he takes great care of the prized bird, ensuring its safety and good health. In turn, day after day the goose delivers a single golden egg, which makes the farmer rich. One day, however, in a moment of greed, the farmer kills the goose in an effort to get all of the golden eggs at once. To his dismay, he finds no gold inside and the bird is now dead. The farmer did not live happily ever after.

So, what happened here? The farmer’s flawed paradigm (WHAT HE SAW) was that all the gold was inside the bird. So, he killed (WHAT HE DID) the goose to obtain the riches faster. In the end, however, the results (WHAT HE GOT) proved disastrous.

Now, suppose the farmer had a better paradigm and believed that this bird of his should not be forced to produce more than one golden egg per day. With that in mind, the farmer would have cared for and protected the goose at all costs and been very happy cashing in one golden egg per day. And he and his wife would have lived happily ever after.

Sometimes, we’re like the farmer and we kill the goose, so to speak. For instance, we may work too hard in school—taking no time for rest, fun, or relationships—and end up burning out. Or, we play so hard that we have no time for schoolwork and end up flunking out. Effectiveness, by contrast, means getting what you want in such a way that you keep getting what you want over time. That’s what it means to be an effective college student.

Let’s take a few minutes to examine some of your paradigms about college and life:

Suppose your paradigm is that you hate math. What will you do? You’ll skip math class and avoid math homework. What results will you get? A failing grade, and you’ll waste a lot of money and time. And you might not graduate.

Here’s another example. Suppose you see yourself as not smart enough to succeed in college or too old or too young, too poor, or too shy. What will you do? You’ll likely quit at the first big challenge, and the results you get are obvious—no college education, no diploma, and a very limited future.

So, here’s how to overcome those limiting paradigms: Put principles at the center of your life. What do I mean by principles? Principles are natural laws that always work. Let me illustrate what I mean:

Years ago, there was a children’s book called The Chance World. Everything in the story occurs by chance. Sometimes the sun rises in the morning, sometimes it doesn’t. Water running over the edge of a cliff might fall down or rise up. An apple seed might produce an apple or maybe a rose. Who knows? Such is life in a “chance world.” Fortunately, even though life isn’t predictable, we do not live in a “chance world.” There are some things we can depend on—they’re called principles, or natural laws. Here is one example: Hard work gets you closer to finishing a job than no work at all. Here’s another one: Staying up late every night makes you tired. Another: A dollar saved will be there if you need it; a dollar spent will not be there. One more for good measure: If you plant seeds in the spring and take care of the plants, you’ll likely have some nice vegetables in the fall. If you don’t do those things, you won’t have the veggies.

Here’s an excellent principle: If you don’t keep trying—even though you struggle—you will fail. It’s that simple.

Principles are timeless: they were true yesterday, they’re true today, and they’ll be true tomorrow. Principles are true everywhere: they apply whether you are in Minnesota, Madagascar, or Mongolia. Principles are also self-evident: they’re true whether we like it or not.

The nice thing about principles is that you can trust them. They will NEVER let you down. And you can let them work for you or against you. There are principles at work in your personal life at all times, principles such as working, saving, and getting enough rest. If you put principles at the center of your life, you will be far more likely to get the life you want.

Not all of us put principles at the center of our lives. If you center your life on a friend, that friend could take over your life or let you down. If you center your life on money, you could lose it. If you center your life on grades, your self-confidence might be shot when you don’t get the grades you want. So, what if you center your life on partying, alcohol, gaming, sports, or social media? What’s the likely outcome? You get the idea.

So, what’s your center? When you center your life on principles, you become a highly effective college student. Principle-centered people make decisions based on principles. They don’t make decisions based on what their boyfriend likes or what will make them the most money. It’s called principle-centered leadership.

Take the principle of honesty. If you’re principle-centered, you tell the truth. You don’t cheat on a test even if it means a better grade. You don’t make up a phony excuse if you have a late paper. You don’t steal stuff from your roommate. As a result, you never get in trouble for being dishonest and you feel good about yourself.

So, what are the timeless, universal principles that make people most effective? My father, Dr. Stephen Covey, wanted to know. He researched 150 years of success literature. It took him many years, but he finally boiled down certain key principles into The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

In the next few chapters, I’ll introduce each of the 7 Habits. I’ll show you how each habit is centered on principles that will really work for you and your college life. If you adopt these 7 Habits you won’t necessarily always succeed at everything you do, but you’ll be a lot more likely to succeed. If you don’t adopt these habits, it’s a pretty sure thing that you’ll fall short of your goals and never arrive where you could have.

So, right now, think of the paradigms you have that are keeping you from succeeding. Maybe you see yourself as unfriendly, or maybe you see yourself as “not a morning person” and so you simply can’t get up on time. Just try the opposite paradigm. Look in the mirror and try seeing yourself as friendly or as a morning person. Then do something in line with that paradigm. Say hi to a lot of people. Get up early for a week. See for yourself the amazing results you can get just from changing your paradigms.

Up next, Habit 1: Be Proactive, the first habit of effective people and the foundation of all the rest.

BABY STEPS

1.Teach to learn. Teach the See-Do-Get Cycle to a friend or family member. Give an example of how your paradigms (See) impact your behavior (Do) and the results of your behavior (Get).

2.Think of a limiting paradigm you have of yourself, such as “I’m not a friendly person” or “I can’t wake up in the mornings.” Sometime today, do something that totally contradicts that paradigm.

3.Consider all the potential life centers mentioned in this chapter: friends, money, fun, parents, school, self, possessions, boyfriend/girlfriend, work, principles, and so forth. Which of these would you consider to be your center? _________________ What is the impact of that center on your life? ____________________________

4.Principles are timeless, universal, and self-evident. Try to name ten principles based on natural laws.

5.Are you violating a principle in your life right now? If so, what are you going to do about it?

6.Think of a person who annoys you or whom you simply don’t like. What is your paradigm of that person? __________________________ Is your paradigm actually accurate? Or do you need to shift it?

7.The next time you look in the mirror, say something positive about yourself.

8.Name three people you would consider to be principle-centered.

9.Where in your life are you having problems? Identify the paradigms that might be behind these problems. How could you shift those paradigms?