Quote #49

“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances — it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In my duties as a supervisor at work I have been trying to work at fully accepting these words. I have, in the past, allowed myself to feel victimized by negative situations that I now accept as my own fault. Sometimes, in the face of failure, there may be evidence that you did everything you could, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it and hope to do better next time.

Of course, there are times that you have to accept what you could not control. Disasters, catastrophes, and many unusual health problems come to mind. We can’t blame ourselves for things that are out of our control. I touched on this topic when I wrote about fighting inanimate objects.

But when it’s not an “inanimate object” (or situation) we need to recognize where we went wrong rather than justifying our failures based on loosely related but ultimately irrelevant data. Other people’s successes and our failures are not circumstantial. We must look at ourselves and evaluate our circumstances based on the cause and effect model. We need to take control, own up, and quit leaving our future to chance.