By: Douglas J Utberg

There is a disturbing trend among both people and politicians to find somebody to blame for each setback, difficulty, or annoyance they experience.  This phenomenon frequently provides a convenient alibi for failure, as some opaque persona such as ‘big business’ or ‘the man’ is blamed for our problems.  The most critical danger of focus on these ghosts of failure is that they give us a subconscious excuse to avoid doing what is necessary for success.  However, the realization of our goals, dreams, and aspirations will require many of us to ‘man up’ (or ‘woman up’ as the case may be) to make our goals happen.

The importance of a perspective of ‘making it happen’ cannot be overstated, since it shifts the responsibility for our circumstances squarely onto our shoulders.  This means that we can no longer place the responsibility for our wellbeing onto other people (or politicians) and must take full accountability for our achievements and failures.  This means that if there are great things we want to achieve, that we must personally take action.  If there is something that we want to do in the future, we must first become educated and then we must take action.  If things don’t turn out the way we wanted, it is our responsibility to study our decisions and learn what we can do differently next time.

In practice, this mindset is quite liberating since it frees us from the constant feeling that we are being held down by somebody else.  The counterpoint to that mental freedom is the realization that all of the obstacles in our way that prevent us from achieving success are really self-imposed.  The truth is that those self-imposed obstacles have always been there . . . it’s just that we were previously unaware of their existence based on a belief that something external was responsible for our failure.  Once we become aware of our ability to influence our own achievements, it becomes our responsibility to identify and remove the obstacles that we have placed in our own way.