Quote of the Week...from Stephen Covey

I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions.   ---Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey is the author best known for his bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a few years ago.  He is a major advocate of people being proactive and not reactive with their lives.  In truth, the way I see it, we are products of both our circumstances and our decisions.  Albert Einstein once wrote, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." In other words, genius begins with one's reasonable recognition of their own abilities and limitations...that's not being negative, for making such an assessment can point to the areas where their genius and talents can instead be fully realized.  Also, folks tend to get into the habit of living their lives according to narratives of self-victimization, that is they either dwell on mistakes others made in their upbringing or identify closely with a demographic group that has been (or still is) maltreated in society and, well, why bother trying when the system is rigged against you? My response is while discrimination has always been a problem and sadly will probably continue to be one, and just about all of us can find some negative things in our own personal pasts to blame someone else for, sometimes it's better to lay that aside and focus our thoughts and efforts on our own behavior.  For when I look back on trials and setbacks in my own life, my memory tends to focus more on how I reacted to them than the events and situations themselves...including those who may have perpetrated some wrong against me.  But that involves me, for the sake of effective living, ridding myself of the notion that my circumstances define me and instead orienting myself around my own decision-making, which in the long run by far determines who I really am and where I will go in life...