It seems everywhere I go, I hear people spouting their experience as a de facto example of success and attributing it to their own actions. This frequently shows up when businessmen talk about how they built up a $X million company using their techniques. They then procede to insist that *your* business or career would be so much better if you'd follow their method.
Now, in some cases, they're right. They can point to measured cause and effect scenarios and logically make their point. However, in lots of the cases that I hear it, the question that runs through my head is always whether their success was because of their approach or in spite of their approach. This is most pronounced when the success they brag about isn't very good when compared with other examples of people starting from the same point.
In other words, if you start with $1 million in seed money and build a $5 million company, and someone else started with $5000 in credit card financing and built a $5 million company, the second person's technique probably had more to do with their success. However, even then, it's possible that the second business owner's technique was the only thing standing in the way of that $5000 turning into $500 million instead.
To me, when I catch myself wanting to brag about any successes and attribute them to specific actions (which, incidentally, lots of recent research has shown we're really bad at as people), I always ask myself whether it's because of what I'm about to attribute it to or in spite of it. I then swallow my pride and coat the success with a little humility because I rarely can actually point to my chosen action as the actual cause.
It's part of my overall philosophy of living in balance.
If you believe that you and you alone are responsible for everything that happens to you, you can easily become arrogant or depressed when things outside your real control happen. Extreme versions of this can be found in lottery winners who just *knew* that those numbers would win. They won the lottery because they always play their birthday, etc. They're clearly ignoring the 754 lottery tickets previously tossed in the trash with those same numbers on them. And, this also includes correctly attributing the source of the success or failure as internal, but pointing to entirely inaccurate events and actions as the source.
Likewise, if you believe that everything that happens is directly caused by things outside yourself, you can easily become a victim or overly lazy. Extreme versions of this can be found with people who have been fired dozens of times and somehow 42 bosses in a row "have a problem" with them.
In between lies an approach of critical self-reflection where we evaluate which things genuinely were in our control and those that weren't. We change the stuff that's sourced internally, try to influence the stuff that's sourced locally and learn to deal with the stuff that is sourced externally. And, we make sure that we understand the true direction of the influence.
