Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together. - Samuel Eliot Morison.

Lao Tsu in his Tao Te Ching shares an invaluable piece of wisdom: “The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.

Aristotle argued that an individual cannot achieve happiness without self-direction. If we believe that a just society is one in which people have the opportunity and freedom to become their best selves, then we shouldn’t tolerate the soft tyranny that millions of employees face each day at work—what oral historian Studs Terkel called “a Monday through Friday kind of dying.

Whether we are free from this empirical, objective sense does not detract from the feeling of being free to choose how to act in one way or another, or to choose to act or not to act.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally “being lived.” They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society. We are responsible for our own effectiveness, for our own happiness, and ultimately, I would say, for most of our circumstances. Samuel Johnson observed: “The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.” Knowing that we are responsible—“response-able”—is fundamental to effectiveness and to every other habit of effectiveness we will discuss.