Is Principled-Centered Living all it's cracked up to be?

July 12, 2008 12:34 PM

How has Principled-centered Living as suggested in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People worked for you?

I read Covey's wildly successful 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about 10 years ago, and thought it was interesting. He suggested over and over again to take a piece of paper out and write down your "principles." I couldn't figure out at the time what he meant by principles or how I was supposed to write this down.

In the past two months though, I've made an effort to craft powerful organizing statements that look every bit to me as being "principles." So far they seem to have helped me re-organize my life significantly and effectively, but I feel like I may be in a placebo-mode or perhaps, in the early part of a rubberband cycle, wherein I get excited about one mantra for a while, and it moves me forward, and then eventually I bounce back.

I tried Googling for more information about "principled-centered living" and couldn't find much except that it's sort of related to Dharmas in Indian philosophy.

Can anybody corroborate or invalidate The Principled-Centered Life before I get too excited about this undertaking?

posted by philosophistry to human relations (12 comments total)

Fwiw, I think it might sound substanceless because it is.
posted by phrontist at 12:40 PM on July 12

I think you're overthinking this...and Covey's book was "wildly successful" because most people don't really bring ethics or "principles" into their daily lives at work.

If you think lying is wrong, don't lie. If you think taking money from the poor is wrong, don't do it. If you think fooling the poor is wrong, dont do it...even if it means not moving up the ladder.

Its not such a foreign concept that you have to search the dharmas or anything. Every culture in the world has a system of "principles" (whether you agree with it or not).

Its just called ethics, and most people would be VERY happy to sell out on them to move up. And then there system of ethics changes, because they've betrayed it...so yeah. Thats all.

Good luck.
posted by hal_c_on at 1:01 PM on July 12 [2 favorites]

I don't know ... I have read bits of Covey's book and came to the conclusion that if you had the discipline to make Covey's suggestions work for you, you wouldn't have needed Covey's book in the first place.
posted by jayder at 1:04 PM on July 12

Covey did start an online center that you might find useful. steven r. covey center

maybe it's because i had the same upbringing, but i can't read Covey without hearing the mormon base to his theories. i also feel like his suggestions about organization and the like are mere ploys to sell the franklin/covey planners. furthermore, i get real nervous anytime someone wants to empower me. it seems like the theory is simple enough, find what's important to you and keep that in mind at all times and in all things. any extrapolating on the theory from there gets you lost in a mountain of buzzwords.
posted by nadawi at 1:06 PM on July 12

Whoops, forgot to add the part of my response that addressed your actual question.

I think it is certainly possible to make "principle-centered living" work for you, but it depends upon a certain strength of will (or resolve) that not everyone has. In every field there are people whose ethical rectitude distinguishes them. But a key to being able to abide by principle-centered living is to live and work in a realm where it is possible to be principled. For example, I don't think politics lends itself to such approaches. There is an inherent dishonesty required to have a viable career as a politician. The fact that principle-centered living depends on your setting suggests the truth of "situational ethics" views. If you're living/working in a community where there is no regard for ethics or principles, it can be professional suicide to be the only one to cling to principles.

Here's an example. As an attorney, I have to deal a lot with opposing counsel, both in criminal and civil cases. Fortunately the local legal community where I practice is pretty collegial, but I can imagine settings where lawyers are very cut-throat, duplicitous, and conniving. If you are an attorney practicing in such a dog-eat-dog locality, you may prefer to abide by elevated principles, but you would be hurting your client if you didn't respond in kind to your opponents' tricks. In a criminal case where someone's life or liberty is at stake, and the prosecution has gained an unfair advantage through unfair manipulations, and you cannot remedy it by above-board means, it could actually ruin your client's life if you clung to principles to which the other side doesn't adhere.
posted by jayder at 1:16 PM on July 12 [1 favorite]

Covey denigrates "family-centeredness" and "job-centeredness" because these centers can fail. Family members can die or move away. Jobs can end. He promotes "principle-centeredness" because a dedication to "eternal, unchanging principles" can never fail.

What I've found, though, is that many of the principles that I was taught and held fast in my youth are invalid. (I am no longer a racist, a jew-hater or a homophobe, though I was raised to be one.) Therefore, the "principle-centered" life is just as prone to disappointment as any other.

I suggest that, to lead a full life, one must have several centers. If you lose your job, your friends can lend you emotional support. If you friends move away, you still have your faith, and so on.

I life needs more than one center to be livable, just as a chair needs more than one leg to stand.
posted by SPrintF at 1:27 PM on July 12 [3 favorites]

Back when Covey's book was all the rage, the company I worked for made nearly everyone take a multi-day training on it. Amusing, because it only took an hour to read that book but we had to meet and discuss it for a week.

The concept is a good one; know your values and don't stray below them. I believe that most people who are happy in their lives are living by their principles. It's simply too stressful to do otherwise. Did Steven Covey teach them to do that? Nope, their parents or family or friends or community or parole office did.
posted by 26.2 at 1:31 PM on July 12

I'm not sure I quite know how to express my objection to Covey in words but I'll try. There's something alien to my whole experience of life so far about the idea of figuring out some fixed set of values and then pursue them every day; it's not the principle-centeredness of the idea that is the problem, it's the fixity. Partly this is what SPrintF says about changing your values and principles from those you were raised with, but it's more, for me, to do with the fact that values and principles are inherently in a constant state of change, or at least openness to change. Or — I don't know. Not so much that my values change, maybe, but that everything changes, and values are just a particular relationship between me and my circumstances at any one point.

It's like purpose-centered living, another self-help buzzphrase: I really feel like somehow our purpose is to discover our purpose, that the discovery and the purpose are the same thing, and therefore that it makes no sense to decide on a menu of values, or a single purpose, first, and then second, to pursue it.

Maybe the shorter version is just that Covey's ideas seem static, somehow, and real experience isn't.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 1:40 PM on July 12 [1 favorite]

Here's an example. As an attorney, I have to deal a lot with opposing counsel, both in criminal and civil cases. Fortunately the local legal community where I practice is pretty collegial, but I can imagine settings where lawyers are very cut-throat, duplicitous, and conniving. If you are an attorney practicing in such a dog-eat-dog locality, you may prefer to abide by elevated principles, but you would be hurting your client if you didn't respond in kind to your opponents' tricks. In a criminal case where someone's life or liberty is at stake, and the prosecution has gained an unfair advantage through unfair manipulations, and you cannot remedy it by above-board means, it could actually ruin your client's life if you clung to principles to which the other side doesn't adhere.

I found Jayder's thoughts here interesting, but it's probably misleading to say that you're only in danger of using underhanded methods to help out a client when the other side is doing the same thing. The argument is that you have a professional obligation to match the other side's tactics if the situation seems to justify it, but that kind of pressure is probably self-imposed.

There must always be the temptation to resort to non-legit methods of helping out your client, no matter what the other side is doing, when you've got strong motivations for winning your case (and that must be most of the time). The idea that the other side's use of unethical tactics would justify one's own adoption of them doesn't hold water with me, but I may be too ethical for my own good ;-)
posted by frosty_hut at 2:14 PM on July 12

maybe it's because i had the same upbringing, but i can't read Covey without hearing the mormon base to his theories. i also feel like his suggestions about organization and the like are mere ploys to sell the franklin/covey planners.

Covey's religion undoubtedly has an influence, but it's only explicitly referenced in foreword and afterword of his books. And its ridiculous to worry about his books being some sort of subliminal or implicit Mormonism, unless you believe that people are able to be passively indoctrinated by what they read.

The charge of writing books to sell planners is a tougher one. Any organisation / planning system will create a demand for specialised tools, and Covey has every right to capitalise on this. Further, Covey's output has been fairly low (4 books in 20 years?), and I don't recall much if any upselling in the books (e.g. referring you to other books and products). A survey of business books said that the worst you could say about Covey was that his method was effective, he appearing in every way to be sincere.

Having said that, the visible fault with Covey's system is that it deals with "strategy" rather than "tactics". That is, it gives you overall direction and principles (what Covey refers to as "Wrong forest!") but not the hourly implementation. It could be argued that this is intentional: that's just not what the system is about.
posted by outlier at 2:59 AM on July 13

Well, to contrast with the negative reviews above, I started reading the book (many years ago), and never got past Habit 1, which I vaguely recall as "when something happens, think before you react".

Just this one habit has helped me more in the past 5 years than I care to mention. I don't always follow it; older habits die hard, but this principle is never far from my mind.

The book came along at the right time, when I needed to hear its message. So to answer the OP's question, this particular principle has been invaluable, and very worthwhile.
posted by flutable at 5:57 AM on July 13 [1 favorite]

The idea that the other side's use of unethical tactics would justify one's own adoption of them doesn't hold water with me, but I may be too ethical for my own good ;-)

I understand this. The reason I mentioned criminal defense specifically, is that abiding by deeply-held principles of ethics (when the other side doesn't) could be detrimental to your client in a way that could cost years of liberty, rather than (in a civil case) just costing a client money. In that situation, the decision to stick to one's principles doesn't just affect the agent's integrity, but carries a real possibility of harm to another ... and I am sure this happens in a lot of other fields.

When I was a philosophy student, I spent a lot of time studying Kant, and I was very attracted by his idea of living autonomously. As I understood Kant, he believed that the only thing that distinguished humans from the rest of nature was our rationality, which placed us --- when we act in accordance with it --- outside of the cause-and-effect relations that govern the rest of nature. To act heteronomously (that is, to be "other-directed") was to be reduced to those causal relationships that govern the whole natural world, and thus was an abdication of our reason. To go through life simply reacting, rather than rationally planning and acting, is to live in a way that is less than human.

It seems that Covey's principle-centered living could possibly be a descendant of Kant's theory. Covey may see many lives as simply struggles to keep up with daily demands, in a way that is merely reactive and unsupported by any guiding principles. By contrast, to live in accordance with deeply held principles seems to resemble Kant's theory of rationality, autonomy, and the categorical imperative, and is more worthy of human dignity.

I think that Kant would argue that the ethical lawyer would be unyielding in the face of unethical conduct by the lawyer's opponent. That is, I do not think Kant would agree that (even in criminal defense) that one could excuse one's deviation from ethical principles based on the other side's deviation.
posted by jayder at 3:56 PM on July 13