Take Responsibility for Your Choices and Actions

With freedom comes responsibility, and every choice we make has consequences. Too often we don’t really like the consequences of our decision, so we try to blame it on others or ignore our responsibility for the outcome. It wasn’t really our fault (or so we tell ourselves)…someone should have made us act differently. But in that case, we would be upset because then we are no longer free to choose.

We have become a society of victims...it seems like the minute something goes wrong we are trying to figure out whose fault it is (other than our own, of course). I feel bad for people who have lots of credit card debt and bills they can't pay, but no one made them use the credit card or buy more than they could afford (excepting of course a medical emergency or something like that).

When things don’t turn out the way we thought they would, we need to analyze what really happened and what we did that contributed to that outcome. I think it’s human nature to try to dismiss our responsibility or blame others, but we need to fight that tendency.

Years ago we made an investment that turned out badly...we lost everything we invested. I really wanted to blame the guy who had persuaded us to make the investment, especially since he kept saying it was "basically a sure thing." But I couldn't blame him, because we made the decision, we were mentally competent, we knew there was risk involved, and we had rolled the dice and lost!! The only good news is that we never made that mistake again!!