When you find common ideas or principles across multiple books and authors, there's a good chance you're closing in on some core principles and truths. I recently read Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and was both surprised and not surprised at all by the number of shared principles between it and Jocko's (and Leif Babin’s) book Extreme Ownership. This post is the first in a series discussing the overlapping principles of the two authors.
To kick off the series, we're going to dive into the foundational structure of both books. Covey's first habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is the most fundamental of all the habits, is to Be Proactive. To explain this idea of being proactive, Covey tells a story of a company with a very dictatorial president. The executives in the company failed to build influence with this president and gossiped about his shortcomings, "absolving themselves of responsibility in the name of the president's weakness". But one executive took a different path. Covey writes:
"One of the executives was proactive. He was driven by values, not feelings. He took the initiative–he anticipated, he empathized, he read the situation. He was not blind to the president's weaknesses; but instead of criticizing them, he would compensate for them. Where the president was weak in his style, he'd try to buffer his own people and make such weaknesses irrelevant. And he'd work with the president's strength–his vision, talent, creativity.
The man focused on his Circle of Influence. He was treated like a gofer, also. But he would do more than what was expected. He anticipated the president's need. He read with empathy the president's underlying concern, so when he presented information, he also gave his analysis and recommendations based on that analysis."
Covey later details:
"[The other executives] focused on finding more information, more ammunition, more evidence as to why they weren't responsible.
But, this man was proactive toward them, too. Little by little, his Circle of Influence grew also. It continued to expand to the extent that eventually no one made any significant moves in the organization without that man's involvement and approval, including the president."
If you have read the book Extreme Ownership, this story sounds awfully familiar. In his book, Jocko writes, "Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization's problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agenda or plans. It mandates that a leader set aside ego, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team." This executive was proactive; he took ownership of his ability to influence the company's president and lead up the chain of command (Chapter 10 of Extreme Ownership). He set aside his ego and attacked the problem that needed to be solved, not the people.
The ideas of being proactive and taking extreme ownership hit at on same core principle, which is that focusing on what we have control over leads to a much more effective life. It is not a coincidence that this principle lays the foundation for both books, being the first chapter in Extreme Ownership (and the title of the book) and the first habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's also not a coincidence that Covey buckets his first three chapters into a section titled "Private Victory" while Jocko combines his first four chapters into a section titled "Winning the War Within". The first step in leading an effective life is focusing on adjusting the lens through which we view ourselves and our ability to take ownership of everything in our world.