The Real 1% Holding You Back

If you believe that even 1% of your failure to produce the results that you want is someone else’s fault, you will never be as successful as you could be. Until you decide that you alone are 100% responsible for the results that you are producing, you will never produce the results you are capable of.

It’s a harsh truth, but it’s the truth nonetheless.

Believing that even 1% of the responsibility for your life and your results rests with someone else—or something else—provides enough of an excuse that you won’t be as successful as you might. You have given yourself an out. You have absolved yourself of some of the responsibility.

It’s an all or nothing proposition. You have to take 100% responsibility, or you’re a 99-percenter, that group that looks outside themselves to blame others for their results.

Don’t Leave a Single Percent . . . Or Anything Greater

You can decide to believe that you missed your number because you don’t have a great sales manager. You don’t have the tools. You don’t have the technology. You didn’t get enough training. But in the end, you still missed your number. If you were a 100-percenter, you would empower yourself to act in a way that ensures you make your number, with or without a sales manager, the tools, the technology, or the training.

You can tell yourself that you lost that big deal because your competitor undercut your price. You can tell yourself you lost the internal political battle in an attempt to absolve yourself of the responsibility for the loss. But you still lost the deal. If you were a 100-percenter, you would instead believe that you could have created more value and done a better job of shifting the decision from price to cost. You could have built the relationships that tilted to politics in your direction.

You can brainwash yourself with the disempowering belief that the economy is responsible for your dismal results. By doing so you deny yourself the gift of your own resourcefulness, your ability to find a way. The 100-percenters found a way, and some of them increased their earnings during the economic downturn.

It’s true that taking 100% responsibility for your life and your results is a scary proposition. If you alone are responsible, you have to own up to your failures and your mistakes. But it is also supremely empowering. The 100-percenters look to their losses and their failures for lessons. The 99-percenters look at their losses and failures to find someone or something to blame.

You weren’t born with certain gifts or talents? So what?

Tough childhood? I’ve seen worse.

Messy divorce? Bankruptcy? No college education? It doesn’t matter.

If you believe that the past events of your life are in any way responsible for your results, you deny yourself your future. Even if you believe that the events of your past are even 1% to blame.

I can point to talentless people who are successful in every way because they take 100% responsibility for producing the results that they desire. I know people with unimaginably horrific childhoods who have set that childhood down and are now successful and happy because they took 100% responsibility for their lives. You know these stories too. You may even have one of your own.

What’s the 1% of blame you need reclaim now so that you can empower yourself by taking 100% responsibility for your life and your results.