Find Total Freedom by Taking Total Accountability

I wake up most mornings between 5.45am and 6.30am, and I am just about ecstatic to get out of bed. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the day. Today, I want to share one of the techniques that I stumbled into that has been instrumental in the continual upkeep of my day-to-day happiness and drive. Make no mistake, much like relationships, happiness does not happen on it’s own. It takes work.

Let’s just lay it out there with no setup:

“Everything that happens to you in your life is 100% your fault.”

There.

Now you can believe me, or you can disagree with me, it doesn’t really matter. The choice is yours on how to live your life. I am just telling you that once I bought into this philosophy, things have been much, much better. Let’s go over a few examples.

1. My profession is sales. Accordingly, I am judged every month/quarter by the money I bring into the company. When I meet with my boss and I have not hit my targets, he naturally asks why. In this situation my typical response will be: “I did not set up enough meetings. With this account, I did not position our products properly. With this account, I did not account for the guy in purchasing. With this account, I did not collect enough intelligence. Etc, etc.” I hear a lot of sales people in this world saying things like: “The economy is down, this guy went on vacation, that guy didn’t like me, the product wasn’t strong enough, blah blah blah.” When I hear this sometimes I want to grab them by the shirt and tell them to stop bitching. It’s all your fault, damn it. Take responsibility. Then I remember that I can’t change people. Sigh.
   
2. You go for a drive on the freeway and hit the brakes when a raccoon runs across the road. The idiot behind you who was tailing you is too slow to react and rear ends you because he did not leave enough room between your cars considering the speeds you were both traveling at. Guess what? Yup – this one is also your fault too, even though it may not seem like it at first. YOU chose to get in the car and get on the highway. YOU understood the risks of driving, the statistics are out there for everyone to see. YOU know that there are idiots on the road, or people driving when they are not in the right state of mind to do so responsibly. So yes, you should still go after the guy for damages etc., but never forget that everything that happens to you in this life IS YOUR FAULT . This will help you be at peace with incidents such as this. You wouldn’t get mad at a fish for swimming in water, then why would you get mad at a jackass driving a car like a jackass? It’s not your job to fix him/her. Worry about yourself.
   Oh yeah and as a side note, all that yelling and screaming and lecturing and cursing that you are directing to that person that just hit your car – all that nonsense – you realize that is for you right? You understand that all of that huffing and puffing is a form of therapy designed to help YOU feel better about what just happened? Because the newsflash is that the person on the other end of the line didn’t even care enough about you to drive in a manner so as to not put your life in danger, and now you think they are going to care about what your opinion of their driving habits is? You are fooling yourself. So lecture, scream, or shout, whatever your style is. Do you feel better now? Good. Your car is still in pieces. Deal with it.
3. Someone you love gets a stupid disease like cancer and dies for no apparent reason. It hurts so much you don’t know what to do with yourself. You can replay the last 10 years over and over in your head, but the reality is that there was nothing you could have done differently to stop this particular outcome from taking place. You are powerless and a victim of circumstance. But it is still your fault. Falling in love, having family, having friends, etc., these are all things that are not without their inherent risks. Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. If you don’t want to feel the pain, then don’t fall in love. If you hate the feeling of loss, then isolate yourself from human relationships. You are free to do whatever you want in this life, nothing is forced upon you. In my opinion, the benefits of having family, friends, and loved ones in your life far outweighs the pain of losing them when dumb shit happens. Dumb shit, however, unexplained as it may be, is a fact of life.
   
4. You win the lottery. It is your fault. Again, in my opinion, luck is just a concept we invented to help us make sense of these events. I don’t much care for it.

So, in summary:

“Everything that happens to you is your fault.”

And

“You don’t really control anything except for your reaction to the cards you were dealt.”

Happy Monday!