RULE TO BREAK

“The world is against you”

Listen, we all get good breaks and bad breaks. People treat us badly, or we get lucky and they spoil us. We all have great teachers, rubbish friends, tricky mums or dads, difficult siblings, supportive adults when we’re growing up … a whole mishmash of influences. Sure, on balance some of us get luckier than others, but we all have negative stuff to contend with. And positive stuff to contend with too.

Once you’ve left home, however, it’s down to you – whoever you are. You can’t go around blaming other people for all the bits of your life that aren’t how you’d like them to be. It’s not your parents’ fault, or your school’s, or anyone else’s. Maybe it was, when you were a little kid, but not any more.

I’m not being unsympathetic. I’m not saying I don’t care. I’m just saying that this is how it is. No one else but you can make the rest of your life better. It’s no good blaming other people for messing up your childhood, and then going ahead and messing up your own adulthood. If you can’t make a decent job of your life yourself, why do you think anyone else should have been able to?

Sometimes blaming other people is the easy option. And yes, maybe you deserve an easy option after what you’ve been through. But not half as much as you deserve a good life from now on. And that can’t happen as long as you put responsibility for your current happiness on the shoulders of your past. You need to wrest control of your life from all of those people who mishandled your childhood, and show them how it should be done.

Of course, this means that when you make bad decisions or poor judgements or unethical choices, that’s down to you. But, if you’re a true Rules player, that won’t happen often. When it does, you’ll stand up and admit to it – just like all those people who influenced your childhood should have done. Maybe some of them did. You won’t blame anyone else, because your life from now on is down to you – the good and the bad.

This isn’t just about what’s right and fair, it’s about what works for you. Have you ever noticed how the people who accept responsibility for themselves are happier? They don’t feel out of control, victims of circumstance. Sure, not everything is under our control, and things will go against us from time to time, but if we’re in charge, we can take action to put them right – or at least to deal with the aftermath in our own way.

If you blame other people, or events, you’re turning yourself into a victim when you could be a winner. The world is full of people who prove this point – if you think about it you’ll know plenty of people who have had tough lives but refuse to see themselves as victims, from icons like Nelson Mandela, to some of your own friends. Why wouldn’t you want to join them?