There is only one person responsible for the quality of the life you live.
That person is YOU.
If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings — everything!
You have to take the position that you have always had the power to make it different, to get it right, to produce the desired result.
Event + Response = Outcome
Every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or poverty, health or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration) is the result of how you have responded to an earlier event or events in your life.
If you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, you can simply change your responses to the events — the way things are — until you get the outcome you want.
Everything you experience today is the result of choices you have made in the past
If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got. If you want something different, you are going to have to do something different! To be more successful, all you have to do is act in ways that produce more of what you want.
Pay attention… Your results don’t lie
Life will always give you feedback about the effects of your behavior if you will just pay attention. Ask yourself:
- How am I creating or allowing this to happen? What am I doing that’s working that I need to be doing more of?
- What am I doing that’s not working? What do I need to be doing less of?
- What am I doing that I need to try on to see if it works?
The formula is simple — do more of what is working, do less of what isn’t, and try on new behaviors to see if they produce better results.
Start paying attention to what is so. Look around at your life and the people in it. Are you and they happy? Is there balance, beauty, comfort, and ease? Do your systems work? Are you getting what you want? Is your net worth increasing? Are your grades satisfactory? Are you healthy, fit, and pain free? Are you getting better in all areas of your life? If not, then something needs to happen, and only you can make it happen.
Don’t kid yourself. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Take your own inventory.
* Source: The Success Principles by Jack Canfield