Focus on the Present and Future
Taking responsibility is a giant leap towards achievement motivation – regaining Weiner’s “locus of control” even if the current self-view is a negative one. (Covey also stresses that we may have to accept a negatively-assessed starting point.) Another is to recognize something equally important – that everything up until the moment we read this sentence is in the past. And that we cannot change the past.
“Put the past in the past and focus on the present,” said Dale Carnegie (1948). In fact he wrote “shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death,” but such prose can be off-putting to modern readers.
Carnegie blamed the past – and obsessing about past mistakes – as one of the central ...
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