“Oh my God, you’re saying I’m responsible for everything that goes wrong in my life? ” Sooner or later, partially or totally, yes, you are.
Remember, I’m not talking about acts of God or nature that are beyond our control. I’m talking about the things that are within our control.
“Sadiq, you don’t understand. My big problem is that we’re not making enough money to be able to even live and do this and that.”
Whose fault is that, your pet dogs?
It’s actually not even about fault. I’m looking for accountability.
When it comes to business stuff especially–technology, people; when it comes to every part of your business or career and your wealth–yes, you’re responsible for every single part of it.
“I’m not responsible for the fact that the economy went down and all my mutual funds went with it, and I’m just peeking up over the edge again right now, five years later.”
Yes, you are. Who decided to buy mutual funds? I didn’t buy any mutual funds; how come you did?
“My broker told me to.” Who picked the broker, the economy or you?
You are responsible for creating your life. You’re responsible for creating what happens for you. And that’s a good thing! If you weren’t responsible for that, that would mean you have no control. That means we’re at the whim of the wind, floating around with nothing going for us.
You take responsibility for your lot in life. You take responsibility for where you are right now and where you want to be.
You don’t take it as, “I’m not doing so well, I should just give up. I’m a bad person.”
If you’re willing to, right now say out loud, “I’m accountable for my life. I’m accountable for everything that happens in it, and I’m accountable for what I’ve created so far.”
If you can do this with full honesty and integrity, you’re better than 99% of people.
If not, no worries. I want you to try a quick exercise that seems ridiculous, but bear with me:
If you had an intention to be poor, how would you go about doing that? How do you get broke? Write down what you’d have to do.
I do this in some of my seminars. Participants would laugh and say, “I’m not going to do that. That’s crazy!” I would put people in groups and they would come up with stuff like:
“You’d have to spend more money than you have coming in.”
“You’d have to laze around most of the day and be ineffective and unproductive.”
“You’d have to give away all your money to people so that you have nothing left.”
“You’d have to make sure you don’t invest it all and put it all in a mattress so it can never grow.”
They would laugh and laugh. Then we’d read these answers collectively. All of a sudden, they recognized that we were dead serious here, and that 99% of everybody did exactly what was on their sheets of paper!
How did you get to where you are? Take a look at the parts of your life that are not working so well and observe, with detached non-judgment, what you had to have done to create the results you did.
If you can understand your strategy for creating the not-so-great things in your life that are happening now, then you have an opportunity to change it.
I’m going to say right now: for me, I’m about six or seven pounds over the weight I would like to be at. When I look in the mirror, I have a hard time not judging myself just a little bit!
Just keeping it real, folks. But I know exactly how I got here: I ate too much of the wrong things without burning it off fast enough. I know how to turn this around.
What’s going to be your turnaround? Share your stories and victories as well as your challenges…I want to hear from you!
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