It’s Your Fault

All of it.

I had an upsetting family incident this week (nothing too serious) but it made me notice something huge.

Taking personal responsibility for everything is incredibly powerful.

It’s the opposite of blaming fate, other people, or the world for things. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter why something happened: the key is how you react to and think about it.

​Tynan has a nice example here.
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Basically if things happen and you blame outside influences, you deny yourself agency. If the world messed things up for you, there is nothing you can do. If your boss is an idiot and keeps ignoring your ideas, you can only give up.

On the other hand, if you take responsibility for everything, then every setback is an opportunity to grow and get better.

Things that don’t kill you make you stronger. For a long time that has been a central tenet in my life.

If your boss is an idiot and ignores your ideas: it’s your fault. If it’s your fault, you can try to improve the situation. Maybe improve your communication of your ideas. Maybe find allies at work. Maybe find another job.

This even works when taken to ridiculous extremes. The earthquake in 2011? My fault. I wasn’t prepared for an earthquake, I didn’t know about tsunamis, we didn’t have enough petrol in the car. All of those things were my fault, and I have the power to fix them in the future.

Someone mentioned the other day that knowing about personal finance is a bit like a superpower. Taking responsibility for everything is a complementary one.

2 Responses

  1. Saying that it’s “your fault” is a value judgment. Saying that “you can influence many things in your life” is a statement about your abilities. These are two entirely different things.
    The phrase “taking responsibility” is ambiguous. It’s some combination of both, but nobody really knows how much of each. (And the same holds for 責任.)