"To achieve goals you've never achieved before, you need to start doing things you've never done before"
About this Quote
Covey’s line is a clean piece of managerial tough love: if you keep getting the same results, stop romanticizing your routine. Its specific intent is behavioral, not inspirational. It’s aimed at the professional who wants the promotion, the healthier body, the functioning team, while quietly protecting the habits and ego that make change feel optional. The phrasing is almost transactional: new goals require new inputs. No magic, no loopholes.
The subtext is where it bites. “Things you’ve never done” isn’t just novelty for novelty’s sake; it’s a demand to confront discomfort and identity. Most people don’t fail for lack of desire. They fail because their current systems - calendar, environment, relationships, self-story - are designed to preserve the status quo. Covey is smuggling in an accusation: you’re not stuck because the world is unfair (even if it is), you’re stuck because you’ve made peace with familiar patterns. The quote flatters ambition while indicting complacency.
Context matters. Covey emerged as a guru of late-20th-century corporate self-improvement, translating older moral ideas (discipline, character, responsibility) into a language legible to office culture. This sentence is a distilled “7 Habits” move: shift from wishing to practicing, from goals as fantasies to goals as commitments embedded in daily behavior. It works because it’s both obvious and unsettling - the kind of truth people nod at and then, if they’re honest, realize they’ve been negotiating with for years.
The subtext is where it bites. “Things you’ve never done” isn’t just novelty for novelty’s sake; it’s a demand to confront discomfort and identity. Most people don’t fail for lack of desire. They fail because their current systems - calendar, environment, relationships, self-story - are designed to preserve the status quo. Covey is smuggling in an accusation: you’re not stuck because the world is unfair (even if it is), you’re stuck because you’ve made peace with familiar patterns. The quote flatters ambition while indicting complacency.
Context matters. Covey emerged as a guru of late-20th-century corporate self-improvement, translating older moral ideas (discipline, character, responsibility) into a language legible to office culture. This sentence is a distilled “7 Habits” move: shift from wishing to practicing, from goals as fantasies to goals as commitments embedded in daily behavior. It works because it’s both obvious and unsettling - the kind of truth people nod at and then, if they’re honest, realize they’ve been negotiating with for years.
Quote Details
| Topic | Goal Setting |
|---|
More Quotes by Stephen
Add to List
