Human beings love to point the finger and blame others when things aren’t going well. We blame our circumstances, we blame others, we blame our upbringing, and we even blame the weather. Anything we can do to make it not our fault, we do it.
I was fortunate to realize at a young age that success and failure was much more in our control than the average person believed. I noticed that people who were set up beautifully for incredible success would often blow it, and run their lives right into the ground. I also noticed that there were many people that came from nothing, or worse, had everything working against them, yet they became unbelievably successful.
It is very helpful to understand that success in any area of life does not happen to you, but happens within you. That success starts when you realize that you have a great amount of control over your destiny. The decisions you make day in and day out impact your path in life, ultimately dictating where you end up.
Our healthcare system has done an amazing job of hijacking the control of your health. Most people believe that the quality of their health is directly affected by the quality of their doctor, hospital system, or health insurance. There is this idea that the better the access to doctors, testing, procedures, and medicine, the better your health will be. It is safe to say, after decades in this model, that this simply is not true. We have become dependent on this outside-in model, believing that our quality and level of health will be better with better doctors and more drugs.
We keep waiting for the next big breakthrough. The excitement that came with cracking the human genetic code has been quickly followed by the disappointing reality that our genes are not our destiny. Despite our craving for answers, there wasn’t a genetic answer to obesity, alcoholism, or cancer. We now realize that we can have great genes and still get sick, and have bad genes and still avoid illness. We discovered that what dictated the expression of these genes is our lifestyle choices… our behavior… the foods we eat… how much we move… our levels of stress exposure… even our thoughts.
You can have the best doctor on the planet, yet still get sick. You can have the best job, yet still get fired or lose it. You can be in the best relationship possible, yet still run it into the ground. You can be financially set, yet find yourself bankrupt. And when we find ourselves down and out, at a low point, in trouble, surrounded by crisis, we want to blame everything and anything around us.
We can have bad luck, uniquely poor circumstances, and a lot working against us, but the truth is, we are responsible for our behavior and our lives. We can make excuses and blame others, but no matter how bad things are, we must take a good hard look in the mirror, accept responsibility, and make life better. Think of all the rags to riches stories you’ve heard. So many have had so much working against them, yet they prevailed. It starts with accepting full responsibility for where you are right now, and accepting the responsibility of turning things around. Success is an inside-out job. It’s not what happens to you… it’s what happens within you!
