Be proactive

7 Habits notes

He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
Between stimulus and response is our greatest power—the freedom to choose.
It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives.
Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them.
It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.
Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, by determining which of these two circles is the focus of most of our time and energy, we can discover much about the degree of our proactivity. Enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.
Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern.