Circe’s Reviews > The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change > Status Update

Life is, by nature, highly interdependent.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.

The kind of reaction that results in people "throwing off their shackles," becoming "liberated","asserting themselves,"and"doing their own thing" often reveals more fundamental dependencies that cannot be run away from because they are internal rather than external-dependencies such as letting the weaknesses of other people ruin our emotional lives or feeling victimized by people and events out of our control.

The little understood concept of interdependence appears to many to smack of dependence, and
therefore, we find people often for selfish reasons, leaving their marriages, abandoning their children,and forsaking all kinds of social responsibility -- all in the name of independence.- Maturity continuum

Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force,and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the
cohesiveness and order

Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force,and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the
cohesiveness and order

Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. "Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action,reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny," the maxim goes. Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns,
they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle

"We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot