1
It’s Not Them. It’s … You
Do you want to avoid setbacks as much as possible and instead experience as much success as you can? In one respect, you’re just like everybody else: you want to lead a good life.
I think that all of us deserve a good life. You, me, and everyone else should be given the chance to have a good life from the moment we find ourselves here on Mother Earth. Life is so short, in some cases little more than a few decades. But regardless of whether you will live to age 50, 60, 75, or—why not—110, I think that you deserve to have a good life during the time you’re here. Even though the planet is presenting us with more problems than we had perhaps foreseen, even though the world is not always a beautiful place, and regardless of the fact that our society sometimes feels totally sick—we have a duty to make the best of what we have.
To achieve these delightful possibilities, there’s really only one thing you need to do. Forget long lists with endless action items; put aside all that good advice. You don’t need to sit down in a corner and meditate, start analyzing your dreams, have a vision, or become a world champion at a single thing. No, there is only one thing you need to do for good fortune to come to you. If you do this single thing, then everything will sort itself out.
Are you ready?
The only thing you need to do is to take 100 percent responsibility for yourself.
Now.
The single most important factor for avoiding problems and creating a bright future for yourself is the ability to take responsibility. Nobody is ever going to achieve his or her dreams without accepting full responsibility.
When I say responsibility, I mean it in a positive sense. Not a burdensome responsibility for the failings of others, or responsibility for the development of society. Or responsibility for global conflict. Or taking on responsibility for whatever mess your boss made without ever getting a “thank you.” No, I mean the responsibility you take for yourself and for your own life. And this is where many of us have a lot to learn.
You are no doubt a responsible person in many respects. I am sure you take care of your family, you’re loyal at work, you don’t subject yourself to unnecessary risks, you stick to the speed limit in school zones, and so on. Absolutely.
But sometimes it goes wrong anyway.
Let’s say that somebody got a nice bonus last month. And her way of celebrating was to spend the whole evening out with the girls on the town.
The result: they had a really great evening, but she’s just as broke as before. Short-term pleasure, instead of a sound life in a long-term sense. And that’s a problem. All of us know this, but we still fail to do the right thing. For various reasons, we hide the truth from ourselves. And we don’t always take responsibility for our situation.
We’ll try again:
Somebody got a nice bonus last month. She invested the money in a sensible equity fund, which has now started to increase in value.
The result: she’s increased her assets and will continue to do so. Suddenly we have a positive result because she was a great deal more responsible.
Let’s look at the three types of responsibility you need to take.
The First Responsibility: Everything That You Do
Your responsibility is basically never-ending.
What does that mean?
It means that everything you do is your responsibility. Your actions, regardless of whether they are evil or good, are entirely your responsibility. Even if someone else asks you to do a particular thing, the decision to do it, and how you do it, is your responsibility. When your partner asks you to do something that you find repulsive, then it’s your responsibility to say yes or no. If your boss asks you to do something that you don’t think is really right—it can be something morally wrong or ethically questionable—it’s your responsibility if you actually do it. It makes no difference that she demanded that you do it. Some people would have said no. When your children nag you about privileges and treats they think they have a right to, and you give in even though you know that it’s entirely wrong, that was your responsibility. To blame your decision on possible consequences won’t work. Other people would not have agreed.
If you’re angry about your rotten sales figures at work, while simultaneously ridiculing the outside consultant who is trying to show you a better way of doing business, well, then you’re responsible for having refused to listen to good advice.
When you drive through a red traffic light because you thought you would get through in time, you’re responsible for all the potential catastrophes that may arise as a result of your decision. You can tell yourself you didn’t “see” the light change because you were so worried about being late to pick up your child from school. But tell that to the police officer who stops you two hundred yards down the road. Or to the dad of the child you nearly ran over.
If you sit too long with your cell phone in your hand in front of the TV and are completely unaware of your teenager’s nervous anxiety before the school dance tomorrow, that, too, is your responsibility. It doesn’t make any difference that you felt that you simply had to watch this cute cat play piano. It was your choice to give priority to your cell phone rather than talk with your child about her worries.
If you wake up on a Saturday morning after the most raucous after-work gathering in modern history, with a hangover of epic proportions, that’s your responsibility. The fact that you’ve gone to an after-work happy hour every Friday for God-knows-how-long doesn’t matter; you’re the person who decided to go. Trying to explain this away to yourself or your partner by saying, Everybody else drank too much, too, doesn’t cut it. It was you who lifted the glass to your lips time after time. The hangover is completely and entirely your own responsibility. Telling your family I can’t drive you to the football game because I “don’t feel too well today” is completely transparent. Nobody falls for it.
A blockhead brought some donuts to the office; you ate two and your diet is all messed up. Come on! Who decided to eat those donuts? Whose body was affected? Your work colleagues’? No, it’s your waistline that is now challenging your clothes budget.
You can’t claim that she did this, so I was forced to do that. No, no. You made an active choice, that is what you did. Necessary or otherwise, you are the one who made the choice.
You can always control your own actions.
If you save money and invest wisely and become economically independent before reaching the age of forty, that is also your responsibility. And you can definitely take the credit for it. It works both ways.
Everything you do is your own responsibility.
You Either Create or Allow Everything That Happens to You
To avoid setbacks and achieve real success, you need to accept that you are the person who governs your own life. This attitude is far from new, and not everybody agrees with it, but let me show you some examples. When I say that you “create” what happens, I mean that to a great degree your own actions influence the result.
If you step into a bar in the wrong part of town on a dark night, walk up to four beefy dudes with shaved heads and tattoos all over their faces, who have been drinking beer since four o’clock in the afternoon, and say, “Goodness, I’ve never seen anything this ugly,” then you’ll know perfectly well why you ended up in the hospital.
But here is an example that’s harder to take in: You stagger home every evening after working overtime again. In a comalike state, you force yourself to eat dinner while—in total silence—you think horrible thoughts about your boss. After that, you vegetate for hours in front of the TV and are bombarded with news about murders, acts of terrorism, corrupt politicians, and doomsday prophecies about our climate. You’re so stressed and tense that it feels like it’s impossible to do anything else. Like, for example, go for a walk together with your partner, or play with your kids for a while before their bedtime. Your partner wants to talk to you about important things, but you’re too tired, so you bluntly say that you need to rest. After three years of this familial bliss, you come home late one evening to a silent, empty house. Your partner has left and taken the children, too. Perhaps there’s a note in the kitchen: You don’t love me anymore.
A simple truth: this, too, was a situation that you were involved in creating. It just took a bit longer to realize it.
The Second Responsibility: Everything You Don’t Do
It’s easy to forget that you are also responsible for everything you do not do.
Every time you know that you ought to go for a walk instead of pour a glass of wine, it’s your responsibility. It doesn’t matter whether you “forgot” or deliberately avoided it (in other words, just couldn’t give a damn). Similarly, if you see somebody who needs some help at work, something that you could do in five minutes, but you choose to look the other way because it isn’t actually your job, then that’s your responsibility. Your decision to be a less-helpful colleague will always be your responsibility. You will discover the consequence of that choice the day you’re the one who needs help.
Every time you press “snooze” on your alarm instead of getting out of bed and reading a book for half an hour, it’s your responsibility. Every time you don’t listen to your partner because you think that you already know what she or he is going to say, it’s your responsibility. If you get a flirty text from a female colleague and you avoid telling her it isn’t okay because you’re married, then you’ve made a fool of yourself. Your ego has nothing to do with it. A failure to make things clear is your responsibility.
None of these are things that you can blame somebody else for. In your heart, you know that I’m right, even though all of us sometimes hide behind apologies and empty excuses. Defense mechanisms are indeed natural. They’re there to protect us from possible dangers, but they aren’t much use when they simply trick us into thinking that we have done the right thing, when really what we have done is wrong.
Sorry? You were late for the meeting because the printer was being used by somebody else? But who chose to wait until the absolute last second to print those damned documents? Who chose not to plan ahead?
What did you say? Your team didn’t do what they should have, and now your boss thinks you messed things up? But who was it didn’t bother to follow up with his team?
If you should study but don’t study, and instead play computer games for six hours, then you only have yourself to blame. It was you who couldn’t care less about studying, and now the exam is coming up regardless.
You didn’t follow up on your threat of turning off the internet if the kids didn’t start tidying up after themselves, and now your home looks like a war zone.
You never demanded that she come with you to the therapist, so now your relationship is worse than ever.
You refused to participate in the company’s in-house training program because you assumed you already knew everything, and now the newly hired twenty-three-year-old has been named the Manager of the Year and is well on his way to becoming your next boss.
You attended a seminar and learned all about the DISC method and its four colors. But despite the fact that you now know that your Yellow behavior means that you’re careless with details, you did nothing to correct it. Now you’ve messed up the contract with the company’s biggest client, and your boss’s boss wants to talk to you about your future at the firm.
You never got around to taking your dogs to training classes, and now all three are totally out of control.
You need to realize that in none of these situations are you a victim of anything but your own passivity. You said nothing, you demanded nothing, you waited too long, you never said yes or no, you never tried anything new. Instead, you just sat there.
It’s not nice to hear it, I know.
2
Seeing the Warning Signs in Time
Very rarely does lightning strike out of a clear blue sky. Oftentimes, we need to train our ability to react to the warning signs that precede unpleasant events. You might feel there’s something in the air: you see something strange, somebody makes a stray comment, your gut says something is off. But sometimes we choose to put the warnings aside and don’t notice things like:
your repeated headaches every Sunday night before work;your teenage son’s endless absence from the dinner table;your belt that seems to have become too short again;the weird sound from somewhere under your car;that strange alcohol smell you notice on someone;the lipstick smear on a shirt collar;your boss’s odd look when you make suggestions.And so it goes on. But sometimes you do need to act when you feel that something isn’t quite right. If you have that feeling, do something about it. If your partner comes home late every Tuesday after work, that’s a pattern that needs to be handled, however unpleasant it may be. Confront the person, because that is how successful people act. They don’t wait passively and hope that it will blow over. They raise the point of concern and ask for feedback. Of course, nobody loves negative feedback or hearing bad news, but once you get it, you can act. It’s better to know about a problem than to go around in ignorance. When the shoe finally drops, it will be much worse than if you had raised the problem early.
You know that I’m right. You can feel it in your entire body, can’t you?
WHY DON’T WE DO ANYTHING EVEN WHEN WE SEE THE YELLOW LIGHT?
Why don’t we react to things that look a bit weird or sound strange? It’s about risk. We don’t want to risk what we have, so we accept some things that we shouldn’t accept. There’s a danger in confronting people around you. Going to your boss and telling it like it is sometimes requires courage. Dealing with unpleasant things with your partner can be unbelievably frightening.
* * *
We’ve seen the warning signs. But we often pretend that we haven’t seen anything, since that’s so much simpler. We keep quiet to avoid confrontation, conflict, and the risk of discovering an unpleasant truth.
For many years I went around with an uneasy feeling in my gut about certain people, both in my personal life and at work. But I learned to escape from the uncomfortable feeling of deceptive denial and to address even very difficult behaviors in others. And I’ve never reverted to pretending to be satisfied when in reality I’m not. You can do the same.
Stop living in passivity and start acting to achieve the life you could have. Don’t stay on in a bad relationship. You’ll only become bitter. Don’t remain in a job you detest. Nobody is going to thank you for it. Ditch your bad eating habits. It’s your body that is suffering, nobody else’s.
There are no rights to claim. The world does not owe you anything. You, and you alone, can change your own situation. Nobody is going to do it for you.
Stop putting things off or turning a blind eye to reality.
Accept this simple fact: you’re responsible for everything you don’t do.
But it doesn’t stop there.
The Third Responsibility: Your Reaction to Everything That Happens
What happens to you is often in large part your responsibility. At this point, many people get irritated and claim that it wasn’t my fault that the traffic was chaotic and I was thirty minutes late for my interview for a new job. How the hell can that be my responsibility? It isn’t my fault!
Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Erikson. Copyright © 2021 by Rod Bradbury
