Earl Nightingale told a story about two brothers, sons of an alcoholic father, who choose different paths for their lives, one “a 
clean-living teetotaler,” the other “a hopeless drunk like his father.” When asked why they each acted like they did, they both indicated “what else would you expect with a father like mine?”
We all have stressful events in our lives, stressful situations, but what happens to us and around us isn’t as important as how we react to what happens.
“[S]tress is not necessarily caused by stressor agents,” said Nightingale, “rather, it is caused by the way stressor agents are perceived, interpreted, or appraised in each individual case. Outside events and people upset some more than others, because they are looked upon and dealt with in entirely different ways. The stressors may even be the same in each case, yet the reaction will almost always be different in different people. Armed with that kind of information, it would seem that we can greatly improve our reactions to stressful situations.”
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