Reading good habits are essential for an individual to grow and develop. The excerpt below is taken from Stephen cove's best selling book, the 7 habits of highly effective people。Before you read the excerpt, think about the following questions. Why do you think habits are important to us? What habits can help us become highly effective people? The seven habits of highly effective people, except the seven habits and overview, we are what we repeatedly do. ExcEllence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Our total, our character, basically, is a composition of our habits. So I thought, rep an action, sell an action. We perhaps IT. So a habit repeating, so a character repeated. Stacy, 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 in effectiveness. As horst man, the great educator, once said, habits are like a cable. We leave a strand of IT every day, and soon IT cannot be broken. I personally do not agree with the last part of his expression. I know they can be broken. Habits can be learnt and unlearned, but I also know IT isn't a quick fix. IT involves a process on a tremendous commitment. Those of us who watched the lunar voyage of Apollo eleven were, as we saw the first men walk on the moon and return to earth, super tips such as fantastic and incredible were inadequate to describe those eventful days. But to get there, those astronauts literally had to break out of the tremendous gravity pool of the earth. More energy was spent in the first few minutes of liftoff, in the first few miles of travel than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles. Habits, too, have tremendous gravity pull more than most people realize or would admit breaking deeply embedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, atis, ts, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a little worlds, wer and a few minor changes in our lives. Lift off takes a tremendous effort, but once we break out of the gravity pull, our freedom takes on a whole new dimension. Like any natural force, the 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 the 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 necessary to establish effectiveness in our lives. Habits defined for our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm for what to do on the why. Skill is that how to do, and desire is the motivation they want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three. I may be in effective in my interactions with my work associate, my spouse or my children, because I constantly tell them what I think, but I never really listen to them. Unless I search out correct principles of human interaction. I may not even know. I need to listen, even if I do know that in order to interact effectively with others, I really need to listen to them. I may not have the skill, I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being, but knowing I need to listen, and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire. IT won't be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions. That being all, seeing change is an upward process being changes, seeing, which in turn changes being. And so fourth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth by working on knowledge, skill and is there, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of suda security for years. It's sometimes a painful process. It's a change that has to be motivated by a higher purpose, by the willingness to subordinate what you think you want now or what you want later. But this process produces happiness, which can be defined in part, at least as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.