下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Most people live in a reactive-responsive mode . When something happens around them, they react and respond immediately, automatically, unthinkingly, becoming slaves to the moment or to the latest ring on their smartphone or computer.
The key to taking full control over your time and your life is for you to stop and think before you react and respond. It is for you to identify the kind of time and behavior that is required of you at each moment, and then for you to respond appropriately to that situation.
British historian Arnold Toynbee won the Nobel Prize for his masterful twelve-volume work, A Study of History . This series of books traces the rise and fall of twenty-three great civilizations or empires over twenty-five hundred years. Toynbee found that there was a predictable cycle that an empire would go through, from its early beginnings through to its collapse.
Toynbee proposed the idea of the “challenge and response theory of history.” He showed that each great civilization started small, sometimes as a single tribe or village, and by repeatedly responding effectively to external challenges, usually from warring tribes and other human enemies, the group continued to grow and expand until it dominated large land masses.
The Mongol Empire, for example, the largest land empire in history, started with three people—Temüjin; his mother, Hoelun; and his young brother—after another Mongol tribe had wiped out their village. From that humble beginning, Temüjin, who later became known as Genghis Khan, “The Perfect Warrior,” spread the Mongol Empire from the Sea of Japan across China, India, much of Russia, and the Middle East, all the way to the Mediterranean and the Danube.