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

If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls. The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer.

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.

When things were in flux, when the social order’s rigidity slackened, a bold individual could jink through the gaps to greatness. Napoleon would never have made it from Corsica to Versailles without the revolution. It was when the established way of things went soft that an individual could press his own imprint into the times. You just had to be able to read the seeming chaos.

One morning Breyten spoke to us: “You need nobody’s permission to join the struggle. Guilt feelings and self-flagellation are self-indulgent sentiments, but understanding of responsibilities gets you moving. It is in walking that you learn how to walk. Watch out for the exultation of the camel-hair shirt. Clean out the cellars, watch out for the corruption of suffering, of self-pity. Don’t go and sell yourselves as brave warriors. To be against apartheid is not heroic, it’s normal.”