We're all born alone, and ultimately, we will all die alone. Although we may be surrounded by our mother, father, doctors, relatives, and friends through all stages of life, in the end, only we can go through each experience and decide for ourselves how we will react and what we will do next. That means the fate of your life lies solely in your own hands.

That's a huge responsibility, but it's ours whether we like it or not. It's easy to blame others for your problems and take credit for anything good, but that's never the way to success. That path can only lead to delusion, frustration, and anger. A far better solution is to look at reality with wide-open eyes, determine what you like, what you don't like, and then go about fixing the problem.

If your car broke down on the highway, you wouldn't blame the economy, the current politicians, other countries, or people you don't like. Doing so still wouldn't fix your problem of a broken car on the side of the road. Instead, you would focus on getting help to tow your car off the road and into a garage where a mechanic could diagnose the problem and fix it.

That's the way you have to approach your own life, by taking responsibility for making decisions that impact the quality of your life. At any moment, you always have a choice. You can actively work toward achieving positive outcomes, or you can passively wait and hope something good will come to your life.

If you passively wait for others to make your life better for you, you're going to be waiting a long time, and it still may never come to pass.

This is your life. You're the one in charge. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can start shaping your life the way you want to live. Trust me, the rewards are well worth it.

LEARNING TO TRUST YOURSELF

There's a paradox in life. When we're born, we have to trust others to care for us. Initially, our parents take care of our physical well-being. Later, other people come into our lives to care for us such as teachers, coaches, neighbors, and friends. Throughout our life, we've always been able to rely on others to help us, yet the paradox is that eventually we need to learn to do everything by ourselves.

As a baby, we depend on our parents to feed, clean, and protect us, but that's a task we must learn for ourselves when we grow up. As we get older, we go to school and teachers help us learn reading, writing, math, and history by showing us new information that we might never have seen before. Even then, schools can only teach us so much. Even if you go through several years of additional schooling and get a master's degree and a PhD, there will come a point where you must start exploring, teaching, and learning on your own.

No one is an island; everybody needs to learn from others. However, no matter how much others might teach you, you must choose your own fate in the end.

Aron Rolston loved the outdoors and soon became an accomplished mountaineer. One of his earliest goals was to climb all 59 of Colorado's peaks over 14,000 feet (4,270 m). While Aron initially relied on others to teach him about hiking, rafting, and rock climbing, eventually he became good enough to perform these skills on his own.

Then on April 26, 2003, Aron decided to go hiking alone in a remote area of Utah. Even worse, he didn't tell anybody where he was going, so when he was climbing through a canyon and a boulder crushed his right hand against the canyon wall, he was on his own.

With no way to call for help, Aron had two choices: One, he could wait and hope that someone might stumble on him by chance, despite his remote location in an area where few hikers explored. Two, Aron could rely on himself and find a way to save himself.

After five days with dwindling supplies of food and water, Aron carved his name on the canyon wall and videotaped a goodbye message to his family, since he didn't expect to survive the night. That night, he hallucinated and had a vision of himself playing with a future child while missing part of his right arm. That dream instilled in him the belief that he could survive.

By now, Aron's arm had partially decomposed due to lack of circulation, which allowed him to tear part of it off. Then he broke his own bones and amputated his forearm using a dull pocket knife. Finally, he severed his major arteries and wrapped a tourniquet around the remains of his arm. The entire painful process took over an hour.

Once freed, he still had to rappel down a 65-foot (20 m) sheer wall, then hike out of the canyon all with one hand. Then he had to walk 8 miles to his car. After walking 6 miles, Aron ran into a family who quickly alerted the authorities and gave him food and water. Amazingly, Aron survived the ordeal and wrote a book about his ordeal that was turned into a movie called 127 Hours, starring James Franco.

Despite losing part of his right arm and spending days of agonizing pain going through a traumatic ordeal, Aron came out of that experience saying, “The tragedy inspired me to test myself. I wanted to reveal to myself who I was: the kind of person who died, or the kind of person who overcame circumstances to help himself and others.”

While few of us will ever need to make similar life or death decisions like Aron Rolston did when he cut off his own arm, we must all make crucial decisions on our own one day that will shape our future. Do we get married to a certain person or not? Do we go to college and if so, which college? What type of work will we do? More importantly, what can we do to test ourselves to see what kind of person we will turn out to be?

Just as Aron had to answer the question of whether he would live or die alone in that canyon with his arm pinned beneath a boulder, so does each of us have to face that day of reckoning when we have to choose what kind of life we want for ourselves.

It's easy to drift through life and let others make decisions for us. Yet no matter what choices others might make for us, even with the best intentions, we must deal with the aftermath. Even then, letting others choose the major decisions in your life is in itself a decision. No matter what, you cannot escape the fact that you and you alone are in control of your life whether you consciously choose or let others choose for you.

It's not easy making choices that have life-changing consequences, but here's the secret. The easiest way to make any decisions is to rely on the principles you stand for. Your principles are your bedrock foundation that defines who you are and what type of person you are.

What if you don't know your principles? Then that's the first step you need to take right now.

KNOW YOUR PRINCIPLES

Once you know your direction and goal you wish to achieve, you can reach that goal in any number of ways, but what's most important is how you reach that goal. You could lie, cheat, and steal your way to your goal, and you might actually reach it in a far shorter amount of time than if you might achieve otherwise. Then again, if you lie, cheat, and steal your way to success, you'll likely taint that success by making numerous enemies along the way. So you have to ask yourself if hurting others is worth it if you can reach your goal faster.

How you do anything depends entirely on your principles.

If you have little or no principles, you'll be willing to do anything to get what you want. If you're willing to hurt others for your own personal gain, you have to ask yourself what kind of person you are. Even if you might reach your goal far faster than you might if you had just treated others kindly, will it be worth it? Is your own success worth having if you have to hurt one person? One hundred people? One thousand people? At what point do you draw the line (if ever)?

If you live a life without principles, you'll risk doing anything and everything to anyone. Remember, the key to happiness involves doing what you enjoy doing and spending time to strengthen relationships with those you care about the most.

If you should hurt others to get what you want, you'll be doing neither of the two tasks necessary for happiness. If you aren't pursuing happiness through enjoyment of doing what you love and spending time with those most important to you, then hurting others to achieve a goal won't necessarily make you any happier in the end. In fact, you'll likely be just as unhappy once you reach your goal as you were when you were striving for your goal.

If you can't look in the mirror and admire the person looking back at you, it's time to develop your principles so you can like the person you see in a mirror. When you can't face yourself, that's a sign that you know you've let yourself down so now it's time to identify what you can change to make yourself proud to be you.

Only you know what makes you disappointed in yourself. Identify the root of that disappointment. It might be your dishonesty with others, the way you treat people, or simply your lack of progress toward your goal. Whatever shortcoming you dislike most about yourself, you are the only one who can fix it. That thought alone can give you a tremendous sense of power because whatever you don't like about yourself, you alone can change it, and these three steps can help:

1. Identify what you don't like about yourself.
2. Identify what advantages you get from your current behavior. After all, if it didn't help you in some way, you wouldn't be doing it.
3. Find a way to change your behavior and still get the advantage you want without engaging in your own behavior that you dislike.

That's the dilemma that you face. On one hand, you have obnoxious behavior that you don't like, yet you still do because it helps you in some way. On the other hand, you have to stop this obnoxious behavior and risk not getting the benefits that it brings you, just so you can live with yourself.

At one time, actor Charlie Sheen was one of the highest-paid actors on TV where he made $2 million an episode filming the hit show Two and a Half Men. Despite massive fame and wealth, Charlie still wasn't happy. He searched for happiness in drugs and alcohol. He looked for quick relationships with prostitutes. He faced domestic violence charges against his wife. He spent all his time and money partying with people who didn't really care about him. His behavior became so erratic that he eventually got fired from his hit show and gradually lost his fame, money, and friends.

In looking back, Charlie said (https://deadline.com/2021/02/charlie-sheen-looks-back-two-and-a-half-men-winning-comments-10th-anniversary-1234702410/), “All I had to do was take a step back and say, ‘OK, let's make a list. Let's list, like, everything that's cool in my life that's going on right now. Let's make a list of what's not cool.’ You know what I'm saying? And the cool list was really full. The not cool list was, like, two things that could've been easily dismissed.”

That's the tug of war you must face. How do you get rid of behavior that gets you what you want in the short-term but sacrifices your principles and your long-term dreams? That's when you must decide what's more important, getting what you want now or becoming the type of person you respect now and in the future. Surprisingly, it's not an easy choice, but it's one you have to make because if you don't like yourself, it doesn't matter how many benefits you get. At the end of the day, you still won't like yourself, so what choice do you really have except to change your behavior?

DEFINING YOUR PRINCIPLES

Principles are not just your core beliefs, but your boundaries as well. It's impossible to tell someone how they should deal with all types of problems they might face in life, but it is far easier to tell someone principles they can use as a measuring stick when given any type of choice.

For example, religious works, such as the Bible, provide plenty of principles such as “Do unto others as you have them do unto you,” “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Love your neighbor.” Whether you're religious or not, principles from respected sources can help guide all aspects of your life.

You can even look at comic book superheroes to see how they follow principles that define their actions and decisions. Batman never takes a life, even those of his enemies, while Captain America believes in the American dream of freedom, equality, and justice. You'll never see Batman beat up a helpless child, nor will you catch Captain America taking a bribe. That's because their actions stay true to their principles. The way they respond to challenges while still sticking to their principles makes them admirable role models.

Now look at what happens if you lack principles of any kind. Without guiding principles, you'll risk focusing solely on yourself and your own interests, possibly at the detriment of everyone else around you. Without principles, it's easy to justify lying, cheating, and stealing to reach your goals.

The way to develop principles is to look at what's most important to you in life and what are the best qualities you need to develop in yourself to reach your goals.

First, what's most important to you? Look beyond any superficial possessions or acknowledgement that others can give you and focus on core ideals that you treasure the most like love, friendship, and trust. What are the boundaries you will never cross and why?

For example, when you're in love, what is one action or behavior will you always do? Why? Likewise, what is one action or behavior you will never do when you're in love? Why?

By identifying your deeply seated beliefs and why you hold them, you can define your core principles that define who you are. Make a list of these principles and objectively study them. Are these the type of principles that will help you achieve your passion? If not, why not?

One way to define your principles is to imagine you're surrounded by your role models and your loved ones. Would they approve of your behavior based on your principles? If not, then you have to question your behavior and decide what's more important: not changing and staying the way you are or changing to become a better version of yourself.

The hard question you must face is deciding whether your principles align with your dreams and with the type of person you want to be. If your principles do not help you or others, then you need to question whether you need to change your principles or adopt different ones. Being selfish or intolerant toward others may not cause problems initially, but eventually those type of principles will make it much harder to live a happy and joyful life with others. The saddest person in the world is someone with no one to share their happiness.

To get you started, consider the following principles that can help you, no matter what you may want to do:

• Gratitude – Being grateful for what you have helps you stay humble while also helping you maintain a positive attitude about life.
• Trustworthy – You can only go so far in life without the help of others, so being someone others can trust will go a long way toward working with others.
• Timeliness – Being on time is crucial because that shows you respect other people's time and thus you also respect others as well.
• Forgiveness – Everyone, including you, may make a mistake so it's important to be forgiving toward others when they slip up, too.
• Integrity – Living with integrity means being open and honest so you do the right thing even if no one is watching.
• Responsibility – Be willing to accept responsibility for your actions.
• Patience – Be patient with yourself and with others.
• Faith – When you believe in yourself, nothing can stop you in pursuing any goal you want.

PRACTICE GRATITUDE

Out of all these principles, gratitude might be the most powerful. If you're constantly working for the future, it's too easy to forget about the present. When you forget about the present, you risk ignoring the present riches in front of you right now. When your dream lies in the future, it's easy to feel unhappy because you're focusing on what you don't have. When you reminisce about the past, it's also easy to feel unhappy because you're focusing on what you can never go back to. That's why you need gratitude to bring you back to the present so you can experience the current moment, which is the only place where happiness can ever be found.

You can only be happy in the present because that's the only moment you can experience, and those moments are fleeting so you must enjoy them while you can.

No matter how far or how close you may be toward your dream, be grateful for what you have regardless of how much or how little you might have at the moment. At the simplest level, you have your health. Without your health, nothing else really matters, so be thankful each day for having another day you can enjoy.

Next, be thankful for the most important people around you. Life keeps changing every day, which means the people you love will change so treasure the time you have with them today. Each moment you spend with your loved ones will create a new, happy memory in your life. That's something you can never get back so enjoy it while you can.

Finally, be thankful for what you've already accomplished so far in pursuing your dream. By focusing on where you are right now in pursuing your dream, you can see how far you've already come. Today is another day to move one step closer, so be thankful you have this chance and do what you can to make it happen.

No matter how much or how little you've accomplished, nobody can ever take that away from you. You did it, you took the chance, you put in the time, and you did something that 99 percent of world would never do.

Gratitude helps you enjoy where you are right now. Now no matter what happens, you know you're already a success.

REGULAR PRINCIPLE CHECKUPS

Once you identify and define your core principles, post them near your mirror, computer, or anywhere else you'll see them at least once a day. The idea is to keep reminding yourself of your core principles so often that they become second nature.

Writing down your core principles helps you clarify those ideas in your mind. Reminding yourself of them every day helps solidify those principles in your own life. Yet it's still important to do daily checkups to make sure you're following your principles the way you should.

Just as you can't expect to fill a car with fresh oil and never have to change it again, so you can't expect to write down your principles and never have to worry about them afterwards. Not only must you know your principles, but you must also live them every day.

Whenever you're faced with a decision, remind yourself of your principles and what they tell you to do. Sometimes letting go of your principles might seem like the easiest or safest way out of a dilemma, but stop.

Each time you ignore and fail to follow your principles, those core ideas will get weaker. Ignore your principles long enough and soon they risk becoming nothing more than fancy words on a piece of paper that has nothing to do with the way you conduct your life.

To ensure that your principles remain a crucial part of your life, keep a daily journal and track all the times when you faced a choice. Each time you followed your principles, write it down. Each time you failed to follow your principles, write it down – along with the reason why. By tracking how many times you follow your principles or not, you can identify when you're falling short of your own ideal nature. Now you can start correcting your behavior so you can stick with your principles consistently.

While you may slip up once in a while, you want to reach the point where you stick to your principles no matter what it might cost you. When your principles become part of your identity, then you'll know they'll be there to guide you every step of the way toward your dreams.

ALIGNING YOUR PRINCIPLES WITH YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

It's hard enough to identify and write down your core principles. It's even harder to review those same principles and apply them to your everyday life. Now an even bigger challenge is maintaining your principles with the people closest to you.

That's because the people around you may have different principles than your own. When faced with conflicting principles, you have a choice: You can either give up or change your principles or get the other person to give up or change their principles.

If your principles are important to you, you should never change them for any reason. The only valid reason to change your principles is when you can see beyond a shadow of a doubt that clinging to your principles are hurting you and/or others around you. If that is the case, your principles are at fault so you need to choose better principles.

However, you may find your principles don't align with someone else's principles, which will inevitably cause problems. This is the time to talk with that person and explain your principles and the conflict they're causing with your relationship. Now it's up to that other person to either change their principles or spend less time in your life altogether.

If your principles are worthy, do not sacrifice them for anyone or any reason. That's when you may need to make a tough decision. Do you continue your relationship with someone who doesn't share your principles or do you change your principles? If your principles are important to you, then they'll likely create conflict between you and another person who doesn't share your principles.

Do you sever your relationship with that person or find a way to maintain it, despite any differences over your principles? That's a choice you have to make, but if your principles are really important to you, then the decision should be clear even though it may not be easy.

If your principles are aligned with your dream and with making you a better person, they are worth far more in the long run than any temporary, short-term gain you may get by ignoring them. Don't do it. The right principles can lift you up. The wrong people can drag you down. Which direction do you want to go?

DON'T SACRIFICE YOUR PRINCIPLES

When you have so many options to choose from, it's easy to weed out the ones that won't seem to work. However, when left with a handful of options that all seem equally valid, how can you choose the right one for you?

That's when you need principles. What do you stand for? What line are you unwilling to cross? What's most important to you? The more clearly defined you know your own principles, the easier it can be to use these principles to filter out the options that you won't even consider even if they appear to help you fulfill your passion much sooner.

Violating your principles is never worth it because when you do that, you betray yourself. If you can't trust yourself, who will? If you can't look at yourself in the mirror with a smile, nobody else will do that either. If you can't sleep at night, why are you choosing options that you know in advance will make you miserable?

Your principles form the bedrock of your self-worth. Once you violate your own principles, you've literally destroyed your life. Don't do it.

If you ever find yourself violating your own principles, stop. Then do whatever it takes to make amends with yourself and everyone who you may have hurt. Your reputation and self-worth is far more important than taking a shortcut to any goal.

You're either following your principles or you're breaking them. There's no in-between, no gray area where you can fool yourself that you're really not violating your principles when you know in your heart that you really are.

Treat your principles as sacred. Given a choice between violating your principles and getting a huge benefit, or not violating your principles and getting a much smaller reward, protect your principles every time. Your principles define who you are. The moment you allow yourself to ignore your own principles, you've literally just given the world permission to ignore your dreams and ultimately yourself as well.

YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE

If your principles fail to align with the people around you, you may need to change your life and seek out people who do align with your values. Even if you minimize contact with people who fail to align with your principles, you'll never be alone. That's because you'll soon find others who want to improve their own lives by adopting similar principles as well.

There's a story about crabs in a basket. If you put one crab in a shallow basket, it will use its legs and claws to climb out. However, if you put two or more crabs in a shallow basket, you never have to watch over them.

That's because each time a crab tries to crawl out of the basket, the other crab will drag it back down. No matter how many times a crab tries to climb out, there will always be another crab who will pull it back down again.

That's the same thing that can happen if you surround yourself with negative people. Rather than let yourself get dragged down by others, it's best to separate yourself from negative influences altogether. Then surround yourself with people who share similar principles, so that way you can all uplift each other rather than tear each other down.

No matter what your principles might be, you can always find people who believe in them as much as you do. If you live your principles, you'll quickly find that you'll attract people who share your principles and repel people who don't share your principles. In this way, you'll gradually fill your life with people who can inspire you and spend less time with people who want to discourage you.

No matter where you are on your journey through life, you can always find friends. The key is being willing to minimize or cut old ties that no longer support you and make room for new relationships. It may be lonely at times and frightening, but in the end, you'll never be alone.

MAKING YOUR OWN DECISIONS

Whenever you're faced with a choice, use your principles to guide you into making the right decision. Sometimes this choice will be clear where one choice lets you embrace your principles while another choice would force you to violate your principles. In those cases, your decision should be straightforward.

However, in many cases, you could be forced to choose between two choices that would both allow you to uphold your principles. So which one should you choose?

When making any decision, look for the element of fear in your choices. At the most extreme level, fear can make you stay in a job you don't like because you're too afraid to start your own business for fear you might fail. Any time you're avoiding one choice out of fear and embracing another choice out of security, that's a red warning flag that you could be making the wrong choice.

Fear is a great motivator when your life is in danger. Fear keeps us from running in traffic, playing with dangerous animals, or ingesting toxic chemicals. While fear can keep us physically safe, fear is a terrible motivator for advancing toward your dreams.

Fear holds you back. If you allow fear to control you, you'll only do what you already do and thus never go anywhere or do anything. Fear is the reason why some people stay in a job for 20 years but essentially have one year's of experience repeated 20 times.

When faced with two equally compelling choices that support your principles, look for the choice that seems safest, easiest, and most secure – and then take a serious look at the other choice instead.

I once met a man who graduated from college in 2000 and wanted to go into the New York financial industry. He got two job interviews right away, where the first job interview was with a prestigious financial services company called Cantor Fitzgerald, a well-established firm that had been around since 1945.

Cantor Fitzgerald offered him a generous salary to work in their offices that contained marble floors and expensive oil paintings on the walls. Best of all, the job was not only high-paying, but secure. Not surprisingly, this man was tempted to take this job for instant wealth, status, and security.

However the second job interview took place in a dingy rented building filled with computers propped up on picnic tables scattered around the room. For his interview, this man spent 30 minutes watching people staring at computer screens and saying nothing. This firm was on the cutting edge of the growing day trading industry, but because they were brand new, they could not offer a large salary, they did not have any status in Wall Street, and they offered no security whatsoever.

Comparing a job with an established firm like Cantor Fitzgerald to this fledging day trading firm seemed unfair. The Cantor Fitzgerald job guaranteed so much more, yet this man had doubts. Although the Cantor Fitzgerald offer seemed the fastest and safest route to wealth and status, the day-trading firm offered a chance to enter a new world that could potentially dominate Wall Street.

So despite the lack of any guarantee, security, or even money, this man chose the day-trading job that was located several blocks away from the World Trade Center where Cantor Fitzgerald had their offices on the top floor.

Every day when this man when to work at this day trading firm, he could see the World Trade towers in the distance. That reminded him all that he had given up by not taking the job with Cantor Fitzgerald, yet he was surprisingly happy with his job at the day-trading firm because it seemed far more interesting than the Cantor Fitzgerald job.

Then on September 11, 2001, hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center towers, knocking them down. That's when this man realized if he had pursued the secure, safe, and easy job with Cantor Fitzgerald, he would have been on the top floors of the World Trade towers when they collapsed. By turning away from safety and security, and choosing the day-trading job that offered nothing but excitement and the possibility of a more interesting future, this man literally had made a decision that saved his life.

Now most people will never have to make life or death decisions, but any time you face major life-altering choices, what will you do? Will you play it safe and choose security over challenge? Or will you choose a more interesting option just because it looks like more fun?

Everyone has heard of Amazon but in Asia, there's a similar company called Alibaba, which is worth billions of dollars. When Joseph Tsai met Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, Joseph was earning $700,000 a year at a private equity investment firm. Ma offered Joseph Tsai a job working for Alibaba for $600 a year, along with the promise of stock options that would only be worth something if the company succeeded.

Logically, the safest and most secure choice would have been to stay at his $700,000 a year investment job, but Joseph Tsai was intrigued by Jack Ma's enthusiasm and decided to take a chance. Today, Alibaba is a global powerhouse and Tsai is a billionaire.

The moral of the story is simple. When faced with potentially life-altering choices, only you can decide what's best for you. No matter what you choose, be aware of the influence of fear because fear will keep you rooted in safety and security and turn you away from far greater opportunities.

If you truly believe in yourself, you can recover from any failure. In fact, many entrepreneurs have gone bankrupt at least once. However, if you cling to security out of fear, the next time another life-altering opportunities comes your way, you'll be far less inclined to even look at it. Eventually, your life can reach a point where you fail to consider any life-altering choices at all because you're too busy holding on to the illusion of safety and security. At the end of your life, do you want to say that you played it safe or that you lived an exciting life? As Steve Jobs once said, “I don't want to be the richest man in the cemetery.” In other words, when given a choice between money and security, or freedom and adventure, which choice do you think will make your life worth living?

Takeaways: No matter what you do, ultimately the responsibility of your choices and your life falls entirely on you. Principles can help define your boundaries so you know what you will and won't do to achieve your goals. Whether you define your own life or let others choose it for you, you're the only one who can reap the rewards and suffer the consequences.