only You are responsible for all your Problems
“If you own this story you get to write the ending.” — Brene Brown
Recently I met a relative of mine — a young man doing well in life. Perhaps because I met after a while, it was immediately obvious that he has put on weight in the wrong places, which could have been only as a result of lackadaisical attitude towards health — eating wrong food in wrong quantities at wrong times. Even before I could make polite enquiries on this matter, he told me that the reason for his visibly falling health standard is a result of his employer requiring him to travel often. This is not allowing him to develop a reasonable practical routine with regards to food and exercise regimen. It was his genuine appraisal that his employer was the culprit.
In a completely unrelated matter, I was recently pulled into a discussion on the (perceived) unfair impact on investors of a damning report of Hindenburg Research, a short seller, on their view on a large business conglomerate in India, Adani Enterprises. This report resulted in a massive fall of stock prices of various Adani business entities. Investors in those firms consequently saw their positions fall precipitously. Perhaps there is something really wrong with the prospects of Adani Enterprises or perhaps Hindenburg embellished details so that they can make a quick buck or perhaps a bit of both. No matter the reason, investors expecting government and the regulatory bodies to protect stock positions misses the point of investing in stocks. Stock prices rise and fall for various reasons, only one of which is the underlying business performance. The investor is solely responsible for investment gains and also the losses. Many people lost a significant chunk of their life’s savings in Enron’s debacle, Global Financial Crisis and various stock market scams. But given that these losses arose in stock market, there was no recourse to restitution.
One of my goals for the next year is to take my mother on a 14 km long pilgrim walk called Giri Pradakshina in the holy town of Arunachalam in South India. One of her first reactions was that she is old (she is 66 years old and yes, she had me very early in her life). I showed her a picture of a runner friend who is 64 years old — she was a podium finisher in her age category in the recently held Mumbai Marathon. This friend did not let age come in her way.
I have a number of runner friends who are middle aged or older and quite a few of them are women. At age 50, one of them gave up on a well set corporate career to pursue her interests fully. And then there is a case of a person who is one of the fastest middle aged amateur women runners in India. When she started running, she was a full time home maker — she used to wake up at ungodly hours well before 4AM to get breakfast ready for her school going children and then used to team up with two youngsters to do her training runs. It is not exactly safe for women to run alone in the wee hours of the mornings. Despite such real challenges, she pursued her interests and now stands as an inspiration in the society to many women and men.
“If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.” — Richard Bach
I have a number of other examples where otherwise regular human beings overcame huge personal constraints so that they are able to accomplish what they truly want. They faced real and hard roadblocks. Easier choice for them would have been yielding to the ordinary flow of life but they did not let themselves become victims of default circumstances. They chose to change their circumstances.
In my own case, for the first two thirds of my corporate life, I had a middling career. This rather long phase was characterized by me trying to run away from the big problems that got thrown at me. In my mind, I justified running away from problem situations with reasons like I had a bad boss, my employer’s values did not align with mine and sometimes the catch-all “bad luck”. If not anything else, this mindset protected my fragile ego. It was not me but someone or something else that is the cause of my troubles. Only when I realized that I need not be the victim, things started to look up quite well for me — for one thing, my career took off rather well.
“You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” — Abraham Lincoln
I was lucky that a right mentor entered my life around a time when I was going through a lean period. Once I started to take responsibility for everything that happened in my life, I developed a solution minded attitude — I started to focus on finding ways to make progress rather than justifying reasons that were holding me back. Now, it is my firm view that victim mindset is severely debilitating. It is particularly insidious because most people are not even aware that they are playing the victim card. If you are busy with finding reasons to rationalize your predicament, you will likely not find the real reasons that put you in that predicament. Irrespective of whether you find the real reasons or not, you certainly will not look for ways to make real progress by getting the situation at hand.
Bottomline
Mind is a powerful thing — one of its main imperative is to protect you — it almost never makes you feel unjustifiably inferior to any task. It rationalizes stuff such that your ego is protected. Ironically, this ends up holding you back from finding ways to progress and thereby you actually end up not being up to task. If you find yourself easily finding reasons for not being able to achieve your goals, perhaps those goals are not important enough. If you make your goals important, you will feel responsible for achieving them. This means you will also feel responsible for finding solutions to overcome hurdles and this means you are liberated from victim mindset and feel empowered to take steps to move you towards your goal.
“When you think everything is someone’s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.” — Dalai Lama
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
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