Extreme ownership

Imagine, that there is a problem in your life. Now, try to be brutally honest to yourself. Are you somebody, who blames external forces for the existence of the problem? (example: I fucked up because of the financial crisis.) Or, are you somebody, who always try to look, what could you done differently to prevent or solve problem which you have?

Now, I do not want to open the discussion if you are the real source of your problems or not. What I want to discuss is differences between these two mindsets. First one is the one, when you take the full responsibility for everything what is happening in your life, oppose to the mindset, where external factors are the source of your suffering.

Imagine the situation where you are the commander of small military troop. Your mission is to execute some plan, in order to succeed with your mission. Before the launch of the mission, the big storm came, and you could not fly the helicopters, so you did not execute the mission.

Now, you cannot control the weather. So the fact that mission was not executed is not your fault. I mean, how can it possibly be? As I already said, you cannot control the weather!

Now, imagine to get crazy in this situation. Imagine that besides all of I wrote above you identify yourself as a reason for that fail. Then you may ask your self: “Is there anything what I could do differently to successfully execute this mission?” Maybe I could have plan B for case of extremely bad weather.

So yes. Maybe there is no way for you changing the weather. But there can certainly be the way for you to be prepared for any situation. And if you are, you can successfully deliver the mission. And it all started with taking the extreme ownership.

Are you the only person to blame for all your problems? Please, answer this question for yourself.

All I wanted is to point out, that taking the path of “owning your problems” will empower you to solve the problem. Blaming others will never get you there.

Thanks for reading.