You are responsible for your own success (and failure)

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] I believe that the success and failures we achieve in life are affected by many variables. Many. Some directly in our control, and some not. However, despite all of that, I firmly believe that you and only you are responsible for your own successes and failures. Every time, all the time. And that, to me, is an incredibly empowering statement.

[00:00:45] We'll get into why, but first, I want to unpack the definition of the word responsible in that statement. You are responsible for your own success and failure.

[00:00:59] I'll unpack this in a couple different ways. The first example, the CEO of a large company cannot control every action, plan, and tactic that her company takes to achieve something. And yet, ultimately, she is absolutely responsible for the success or failure of her company. Responsibility doesn't mean you have control over everything. But it means you take ownership. You become accountable.

[00:01:26] The second example. If your toddler draws all over the walls of someone else's house with permanent marker, you take responsibility for it. I mean, you didn't draw all those things. You may even have taught your kid better. It's not actually your fault, maybe. It's not your kid who's responsible for what happened. You, the parent, are. Responsibility doesn't mean you did it yourself, it means you're accountable for it even if you didn't do it yourself.

[00:01:58] You are responsible for your own successes and failures.

[00:02:03] This statement squarely puts you in the driver's seat of your life. It demands that you accept the power you already have to affect your own situation. It says that if you failed, that was your responsibility. Which means you also have the power to go change it. It says that if you succeeded, that's your responsibility. And now you have to uphold and respect the additional influence and power that comes with it.

[00:02:30] You are responsible for your own successes and failures.

[00:02:34] That means you go out there and you take all the appropriate and necessary actions to create the outcomes you are looking for. You do not wait for the lottery ticket to fall in your lap. You go buy one. You do not wait for someone to give you information. You go asking.

[00:02:52] You know, I recently read an article, and I'll put it in the show notes, on the concept of push and pull. You have push actions and behaviors that send out something towards people, and then you have pull actions and behaviors, and they productively consume information and demonstrate the need for that information to exist, to perhaps be pushed.

[00:03:13] It's a great concept, and it applies in a lot of places. But I don't think it holds extremely high value when thinking about personal responsibility. If I'm pulling information from a system or a person, the personal responsibility way is to say, Oh, I'm probably pulling the wrong way. Let me try again and again until I find the way that works in this system. The non personal responsibility way is to say the system is wrong or the person doesn't push, and then give up or not have the tenacity to keep trying. Now, don't get me wrong. There is a balance. It is often true that the push side is a little wrong and needs correction, or the pull side is a little wrong and needs correction.

[00:03:58] So what you do is you adjust the side that is a little wrong, and you work on adjusting the side that you can adjust right now. So that you can just get on with your work. There is a balance between short term and long term here. Your current needs and what you need to do to achieve them, and the longer term needs that will make future you's life easier.

[00:04:23] I think that it's absolutely more empowering to put the onus squarely on yourself every time. This can also get exhausting, so you need to know your limits. But you'll quickly find them if you look. I know mine. I've practiced deep personal responsibility for at least the last eight years. I'm familiar with my own signs of stress, exhaustion, burnout, and overwhelm. I know when I need to go ask for help. That is also part of my philosophy of personal responsibility. I am personally responsible for ensuring I am in good condition to be able to do what I need to do to achieve what I need to achieve.

[00:05:05] As I recently said to someone I care about, do not be like the heart that overworks itself in a bad situation and dies because it created a heart attack. Be like the liver, which regrows itself if a lobe is taken because that is in the best interest of the system. And it continues to function instead of croaking like the heart because that is also For the good of the system.

[00:05:30] Empower yourself. Always. Sometimes I forget to. Sometimes I also say, Hey, the system messed up and oh, what am I gonna do? But I try to remember to empower myself more often than not. Because, I cannot bear to live in a world where my own success and failure is out of my own hands. I mean, who wants to live that way? I guess some people do. Some people are comfortable accepting this to some level. But, I'm just not convinced that it would help you lead a better life.

[00:06:04] You know?

[00:06:09] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?