As a business owner, it can be easy to blame factors other than your own shortcomings when something goes wrong. The same tendency can of course be seen among employees as well. I would like us to pause for a moment and consider what happens if you do the exact opposite.
When an important client terminates a contract, a key employee resigns, or lightning strikes and wipes out the entire database, it is easy to think that we haven’t done anything wrong. After all, who can control lightning?
I have had the opposite mindset drilled into me: if lightning strikes my database, it is my fault. Lightning doesn’t care. The important client who terminates the contract—regardless of the excuse—is my fault. It doesn’t matter if the client received a cheaper offer elsewhere, it doesn’t matter that “we did everything” for the client. The client cannot be responsible for my company doing well. The responsibility is mine.
If I accept responsibility for my company in this way, then I accept responsibility for my life as a whole. If I accept that responsibility, then it is never anyone else’s fault. This implies several things. It means that if the client didn’t understand how good a product we delivered, then the client isn’t an idiot—we communicated poorly what we delivered. It means that if lightning struck our servers, then either we placed the servers in the wrong location or we didn’t have sufficient backups. It is neither lightning’s nor the client’s responsibility that my servers work and that I get paid well—I have already accepted responsibility for my life.
If you want to succeed at something in life, this is the only possible mindset. It applies to entrepreneurship just as much as to everything else. It’s not the teacher’s fault if you don’t learn anything in school. If you share my mindset, you can improve. If you prefer to blame others, then everyone else has to improve before your life gets better. Lightning doesn’t care how well you’re doing, so if you accept responsibility, everything becomes much easier. You might as well shoulder the responsibility and realize that the fault lies with you.
What does this article mean?
If I wasn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: since you are the one who cares about how things go for you or your company, it is your responsibility to make sure things turn out right—regardless of who or what puts obstacles in your way. This applies whether you are an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, or just trying to win at Monopoly.
This will make a difference in how successful you are in your endeavors—I am convinced of that.
