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 ‘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.

Make Your Own Luck

There is a popular aphorism that you make your own luck.  While this is not completely true, it contains a valuable nugget of insight.  Luck is a factor that is beyond our realm of control.  However, we have supreme control over whether we will be prepared to reap the benefits when fortune turns in our favor.  Every person experiences opportunities that emerge throughout the course of their lives.  However, not all people are willing or able to capitalize on opportunity when it occurs.  Thus, by perpetually preparing yourself to capitalize on opportunity, you will be able to create the conditions for success when luck turns in your favor.

The truth is that we each have the ability to influence the shape and course of our personal, professional, and financial future.  The decisions we make create the basis for our future achievements.  Each step that we take builds on the actions and decisions that we made in the past.  We make our future happen through intelligent decisions.  If we want to enhance the trajectory of our future, we only need to increase the number of intelligent decisions that we make.  In this way, our part of success boils down to a science of increasing our velocity of intelligent decisions.

We may not be able to directly create the luck that we need to achieve all of our ambitions, but we can make the conditions happen that will allow fortune to smile on us.  If we truly wish to achieve our ambitions, we must move beyond ‘hoping’ that they happen and embark on a journey to ‘make’ them happen.  This is likely to involve a significant intellectual commitment, but is a matter of critical importance to our personal, professional, and financial lives.

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.