Nick's Journal
This week the focus will be Ownership, along with its opposite, at least in the context in which I am speaking of it, which is Victimhood. Long one this week as it’s important, so buckle up!
One of the most common things I find myself telling my son whenever he does something wrong is for him to own it. What you find out when you have young children is that their first instinct is always to blame someone else, to try to deflect criticism to another, even when they themselves were clearly in the wrong.
Of course this would be instinctive to a young child, as they know that doing wrong comes with some sort of punishment. And so, I make sure that each and every time that happens that I punish the blaming he does more than whatever the incident or original fault was. I do this deliberately and relentlessly, as I want the message to be that Daddy will accept that he messed up, but if he blames his sister for his mess up than he is in DEEP trouble.
When he breaks out the classic “But she hit me first!” line (which she 100% did because, first, she is female, second, she is his younger sister, and third, she has reddish hair, all of which means that she is manipulative by nature) I make sure to call him out. I don’t care that she hit you first, I care what you did. Did YOU do the right thing? I’ll deal with her separately - (as and aside, she is much harder to deal with – in her vs. the world, it’s the world I fear for).
Slowly, every so slowly, he has begun to apologize for what he did and not speak of whatever anyone else did. If I manage to do anything properly as a father, I sincerely hope that it is this one thing. To me, there is no more important lesson that I could teach him and no more valuable skill in life. You can't be there to fight their battles so you need to arm them to fight them on their own, properly.
My daughter, being female, is likely beyond any attempt to influence her but I try my best regardless. I suspect she’ll spend the first 25-30 years of her life mercilessly taking advantage of some young man though. She already has suitors. They are already wrapped around her finger, responding to her every demand. She already knows this. It’s not funny. Sigh.
I mess up all the time. I make decisions that are selfish. I make mistakes that I could have avoided. I do things that I know many others might consider wrong (although to them I say, live your own fucking life and don’t try to live mine, ever so kindly). What I do try to do, each and every time, is to own my shit. If I messed up, I messed up. If someone deserves an apology, then they get it, even if they are going to rub my face in it, even if they are a terrible person themselves.
I break down interactions, I figure out what I did wrong (not why, the why is normally just thinly disguised rationalization) and I challenge myself on it. I TRY to fix it. That shit is hard to fix sometimes, it’s often core behavioral patterns, it’s your innermost desires, your internal wiring, your basest instincts.
It’s impossible to fix if you aren't absolutely focused on it though. I don't have any possibility of improvement unless I am relentless on looking at my fuckups and figuring out what I did that led to them, and then doing my best to fix the behavior. That doesn't even mean the outcome would have changed in most cases. Sometimes 90% of the issue is with external forces so if I fix my 10% it might still get the same outcome. That 10% is what I CAN fix though, so it’s what I focus on.
Why is this important?
As someone who witnesses people without courage or conviction every single day (hell its damn near an epidemic in some age groups now), that is almost always a sign of someone with poor character and who is going to struggle in life as a result. Leadership requires courage, period. It requires the ability to take challenges head-on, to do the uncomfortable because it needs doing. It’s not the easy way out, it’s not the shortcut and when you default to that sort of thing you undermine your ability to truly be successful.
While society might reward victimhood in minor ways, these ways will never lead to actual growth or positions of any real authority. They can come with short term gain, but they are not load-bearing and they have a short shelf life. And once they lose their power, they leave you with a very deep hole to dig yourself out of.
You need to learn to own every little damn thing. You’ll never WANT to. It’s ALWAYS the harder choice. You can weasel your way a certain way up a hierarchy but it’s not particularly high before owning your shit becomes the most important thing, and it’s obvious to anyone who understands what it is. And you have to be WAY up a hierarchy to have even a decent standard of living these days.
If you let it, your brain will rationalize ANYTHING, will allow you to be terrible to people who didn’t deserve it (or maybe they did deserve it but YOU still should be better than that). Do that enough and you will never grow, you’ll just take the easy way out. You can’t fix that which you didn’t acknowledge as being wrong in the first place. If you just run and hide, you’ll tell yourself a narrative that makes such behavior acceptable, meanwhile, it’s just childish and a sign of a lack of emotional maturity.
Doesn’t matter who you are doing it to, it’s you that suffers, you who has held yourself to such a sad standard. Your actions speak very loudly whether you realize it or not, they demonstrate your current mindset, whether you are actually challenging yourself and not just others. You can spot this very quickly in others and it’s always to someone’s detriment when they signal they lack ownership.
Returning to my son, if I let him use his excuse, he would pummel his sister if she gave him so much as a light tap on the arm. And would he be right? Of course not, but she would bait him into getting himself in trouble constantly, or even worse, actually hurting her in a serious way. And HE would be responsible. HE would be the one in the wrong. And HE would never understand that, would never learn from it and figure out better ways of handling the situation if he didn’t own that he was wrong. And keep in mind, he’s not 100% of the wrong. Some days he might even be just 10% of it as she’s quite the instigator, what little sister isn’t after all? It doesn’t matter, you own the 10%.
There simply is no substitute for complete and total ownership. It is the single most empowering mindset you can have. If you can understand that you control yourself and only yourself, and that you ARE in control of yourself - that is what leads to, and allows you, to do and try anything you want to.
Instead of complaining that you didn’t get to be XYZ because ABC, you’ll instead begin to frame it like it actually is. You CHOSE not to be XYZ because it required ABC, and that wasn’t worth it to you. And maybe you had a family commitment, or too many setbacks, or any number of other reasons. The underlying reason is the same though, you chose not to do it at some point – there was a price, it wasn’t worth it to you. Had life gone differently maybe it would have been but so what?
And the flip side to that is that NOTHING IS STOPPING YOU. You can choose to be ambitious about something. To take a big risk. To not settle for something you do not wish to settle for. To keep trying, no matter what obstacles come up, to overcome anything and everything in pursuit of what you actually want, what you've chosen.
You are in charge. You are not a victim, even if you’ve suffered countless wrongs. If someone does something terrible to you, that is on them. Some of the best people in my life fucked up big things with me and we moved on from it, yawn - life happens. People are flawed, you shouldn’t expect more from the people closest to you than you do from the broader world, you are just seeing their flaws because they are closest to you, after all.
Demand perfection and all you are demanding is deception.
So, besides just owning your mistakes and your day-to-day challenges, how can you institute ownership into your life to drive change?
Make sure you have something positive to put your time towards outside of work. Make it ambitious in the long-term. It doesn’t have to happen overnight, but you want something that when you finish it, you’ll be happy with the accomplishment, and you’ll enjoy the journey. Things like this will grow you as a person immensely.
Put away the phone, fuck Tiktok, do something productive, pick a skill or hobby that will grow you, and you’ll be a far better person for it. Do public speaking, learn a language, pick an instrument, volunteer and organize for a cause you support. And when you finish it, you start the next thing. That short term hedonic shit like Netflix is cancer in the long run – cut out as much of it as you can. Own your habits.
I’ll leave it there, with one last parting word. Spend a day focused on this, on each and every choice you are making. On what that choice will look like over time, if you continue to make it each day. On your diet, your exercise, your friends and your hobbies. Do that and I would be seriously surprised if you do not end the day feeling that you have far more control over your life than you likely admit to yourself.
Much love as always,
Nick