At the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (spoiler alert), Harry stands near the lake waiting for his father to appear and ward off the dementors attacking Sirius’s, Hermione’s, and his past selves.

After waiting for an agonizing amount of time, he realizes that he was the person who conjured the Patronus and drove the creatures away, not his father. He was the person he’d been waiting for all along.

Even without time travel, this is a relevant lesson to us. We often sit around waiting for someone to swoop in and save the day. We wait for someone else to act.

The problem is that everyone else is doing the same thing—they are all waiting around for someone else to rescue them from whatever the problem may be.

At some point, you must wake up and realize you are the hero of your story. You are the person everyone else is waiting for to act.

Someone eventually has to take a stand, so it might need to be you.