Don’t you hate it when someone does you wrong? Who wouldn’t hate that? Should you blame them for the mistreatment. Sure, why not, if that’s a fair assessment.
But wait, the title of this is called, “Don’t Blame Other” so what gives?
Ok, ok. Blame is a probably the wrong word. Sometimes, other people are truly at fault for wrong doing. You can’t always turn a blind eye to that. But lets look at this from the perspective of accountability. Not theirs, but yours.
No, no, they did…
Please, if you’re going to be successful in life, you can’t let other people’s decisions run your life. Let me explain.
- How We Allow Others To Hold Us Back
You have dreams, you have goals. Depending on who you ask, they might be realistic or far-fetched. It doesn’t matter. What matters is our actual decisions. When we fail to act on our goals, the only person we have to blame is ourselves. So who do we blame? Usually, someone else.
Why do we do that?
Sure, maybe it was someone else who cheated us out of the money we needed. Maybe it was someone else who asked us to help them out with a different project and put off doing our own. Maybe it was someone else whose opinion really matters to you, and they thought your ideas were frivolous.
There’s a lot of reasons we might find blame in others when it comes to accomplishing our dreams. If we can’t find anyone personal, then we tend to go impersonal. We blame YouTube for not showing our videos to very many people. We blame publishers for not even reading the book we submit to them. We blame the government for our poor health because they allowed GMO foods into our grocery stores.
Lets not forget God. Often we blame him for anything and everything that goes wrong in our lives, especially when we can’t find anyone else to blame. Why did I get this disease? Why did he take my loved ones. Why are his followers such hypocrites.
Have you noticed the single person in here who we don’t blame? That’s right. Its ourselves. We’re always happy to take all the credit for any good accomplishment in our lives, but we hate accepting blame for ourselves.
But legitimate things do affect our success in life. I’m not arguing that. When my pool business failed and I lost $500,000, as much as my house was worth at the time, I tried for weeks to find someone or something else to blame. Was it my partners, was it my employees, was it the market, my customers? I could write a list of all the things that went wrong, and happily assign blame. What hurt most, was seeing how other pool companies were starting up at the same time and succeeding.
That pain came from knowing that some other entrepreneur was successful, and I was not. In the end, I had to place the accountability squarely on my own shoulders. Once I did that, I was able to re-contextualize all the things that went wrong. I turned those failures into learning experiences, so that next time around, I would know where my blind spots were. As a business owner, the buck starts and stops with you. Sure you need to assemble a good team around you, if you can, but if you’re risking your hard earned money, or that of someone else, you are responsible. So accept that responsibility, and get to work!
- How To Break Your Cycle Of Blame
Is it too hot outside to work? Do your feet hurt too much to work? The easy answer will always be yes.
I’ve been blessed that one of my superpowers is to always take the hardest way possible. Maybe you’re saying that doesn’t sound like a superpower, more like a weakness. Sometimes I might agree with you. But here’s the thing, I don’t always like working in less than ideal conditions, but I always love looking back on my accomplishments, seeing the hard that I pushed through, and feeling proud of it.
It’s like hiking a mountain. I went on a hike once, worst hike of my life. I was with two other guys, one who was an athlete, one who never got off his butt and away from his computer screen for more time than it took to go to the bathroom.
So we start hiking this mountain, one of the tallest ones around us. It was to be a half day hike. I’m pretty good at hiking. I’ve done enough of it, am conditioned for it, and I was looking forward to it. Our pale friend who just saw the sun for the first time that year, was not so conditioned.
While me and my athletic friend had planned accordingly and brought enough water for ourselves, probably a liter or two each, the other guy had instead brought a backpack with a 12-pack of Gatorade. That in itself wasn’t terribly odd. What was odd, was that within the first hour of the hike, before me and the other guy had even touched our own waters, and before we were even a quarter of the way up the mountain, he had drank all his Gatorade.
It wasn’t long after that, when he started showing major signs of fatigue and heat exhaustion. Not wanting to turn back, he insisted on continuing. Knowing that I could probably handle the hike with less water, I gave him most of mine, saving just enough to wet my throat for the remainder of the hike up, where I would refill my water on a snow-cap.
I underestimated the length and difficulty of the hike. The last quarter of the hike became more of one where we had to crawl on all fours, just to make the final ascent safely. By the time I got to the top, he had drank all my water, was about to have heat stroke, and I was now entering heat exhaustion also.
Luckily, we found the snow-cap at the top and replenished our water, but if you’ve ever been heat exhausted, you might know that it doesn’t go away once you’ve cooled down. We rested for a good hour up there, and the one friend was ready to give up and die up there. I was feeling pretty miserable too, but we talked him into going down, and would you believe it, going down, because of our conditions, was harder than going up.
There were times that I, in no good shape myself, had to help the other guy down, as he was pretty well shutting down. By the time we got back to the car, I was about to start dry heaving, and he was nearly comatose.
Here’s the thing though, I’m glad I did that hike. I’m glad that I was in a position to help that other friend make it down the mountain. I’m glad I made it to the peak. Could I have blamed him for not being in shape? Or for not turning around? Or for taking all my water?
Sure, but what good would that have done. I saw a lot of beautiful country and wildlife, had fun with friends, and I survived with a cool story to tell. I felt so miserable and sick, and maybe I even entertained blaming him for a while, but I was the one who chose to give him my water. I was the one who, even though I felt miserable, was still able to get him back off the mountain. I pushed through the pain and did something good.
Through it all, I became more experienced, gained a little more wisdom, and became a little more resilient to hardship.
That’s the trick, push through the hard times. Difficult things refine us. They keep us from being overwhelmed. They let us know that our limits really are more than perhaps we give ourselves credit for.
And if we do have legitimate limitations to our abilities, we can always use that creative brain of ours to find a work-a-round to accomplish our goals. The adage: Where there’s a will, there’s a way, has endured through the generations because it is true.
Don’t blame anyone but yourself, and reach a little further. Let your ambition take accountability for itself, and you can do wonders.
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