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I often wonder whether people who are unsuccessful in life blame the circumstances around them for their lack of success. Or they blame the lack of opportunity for their lack of progress.

Or are they merely suffering from idleness, where they see the opportunities, but just choose to do absolutely nothing to gain advantage from those opportunities?

Or even worse, don’t even “see” the opportunities when they appear in the first place, by turning a blind eye?

I have long wondered this because I have been fortunate to run several businesses in different countries over the years and had to employ people in various capacities.

Even when opportunities are simple, a certain demographic of people laments that the option is not for them, even though they are supposedly looking for work.

Granted you don’t often know what is going on in people’s personal lives to give this sort of response. However, if they don’t “choose” to take the opportunities when they appear, they really should refrain from moaning about the lack of opportunity.

This, in my opinion, is probably the worst element of all. Moaning about not taking an opportunity and then belittling or complaining there are no opportunities when they haven’t even “tried”.

People from less well-off backgrounds, not only grasp opportunities when they appear but seem to excel in them, making them work for them. This therefore allows them more life choices that were closed to them previously.

This type of example then demonstrates to me that the opportunity is not at fault nor the potential lack of opportunity as some have lamented.

Instead, it is always the people who have the wrong attitude towards opportunity in the first place. And those that lament, are the ones who I probably have an issue with the most.

So what do you think? Do you agree? Or is lack of opportunity the real reason?

Idleness is a choice and a major key to poverty in society. Idleness is a part of fear. Fear of the outcome. Fear that the outcome is perhaps worse than what you have now? So fear grips and inaction is the result. Regular inaction leads to idleness and apathy. A spiral we may struggle to remove ourselves from.

What crooked thinking.

Because any outcome is unknown and the crooked manifestation of the outcome is just a poor thought process in your head. Fear perhaps that if you act, may require energy that you feel you don’t possess and then the outcome is a failure. So the action and energy were wasted. Thus the poor thought is to believe it is not worth trying in the first place.

How wrong this is.

Opportunity comes to all of us during our lifetime. We don’t know what that opportunity is and in what form it takes, but it does appear during our lifetime. However, it takes courage to spot it when it appears and action to grab it and use it. But you have to have tried and acted on numerous occasions, even without success, until you eventually find that success. If you fail to act believing it is not worthwhile, you will miss those opportunities when they DO appear

The action seems to be linked to eventual success, whereas inaction is a guarantee of failure

So it’s better to act even if you’re unsure of the outcome, as action will eventually bring success. Whereas inaction is a failure by default.

So change your thinking and understand inaction leads to no-where, but action, repeated, will eventually lead to successes

In the UK there is an advert on TV that is for the British Army and they say to come and join them to “Be the Best”!

What a great mantra to live by. Because you should strive to Be Your Best in Life no matter what you are doing. Sorry, British Army, but you don’t need to join the army in order to be your best, however, I do love the slogan and what they are meaning by the advert.

Although I am not recruiting for the army, they do challenge you as an individual and “encourage” you to do things you may not necessarily want to do, but by attempting these things which in essence are out of your comfort zone, you discover talents you did not know you possessed. So they do mean it when they say, be the best!

Now as I said above, you don’t need to join the army to be your best. You just need to be your best in everything you do in your day-to-day life and do things every day to make the world a better place.

Let’s be honest, you will leave this stage called “Life” at some point in the future, so how do you want to leave your legacy? Don’t you want to leave this planet that little bit better than when you found it?

So when you do eventually get to your death bed you can feel proud that you gave it your best and lived your life as best you could. Because by giving it your best and trying your best at everything you try and do, you actually leave the world a better place by default.

So strive to be your best, no matter what, you’ll be glad you did and the world will thank you for it

Who has heard someone say this before?

Maybe it was you that said it too

But let’s analyze this for a second…

If something has happened and you genuinely had no involvement whatsoever, nor did you have any influence in the outcome in any way (either physically or verbally), then “yes” you can say, it is not your fault.

However, if there is an outcome that was due to something you did or said, or you somehow “steered” the outcome in a direction slightly differently than it would otherwise have gone, then you cannot say it is no longer your fault. You had a part to play, even if that part was very insignificant

What we need to understand is that we have a responsibility for our actions (and this includes words too!) and we shouldn’t shirk away from this. If we discover that something has gone wrong and we have had some role to play in it not going as planned, we need to stand up and take responsibility for our role in it.

We then need to learn lessons from the issue and then try and correct it

This way things can move forward.

However, there is something we mustn’t do in all this. And that is blame ourselves in a negative or disparaging way and then mull over it to our detriment.

Don’t start beating yourself up! This is common to do, but it just negatively affects your mental health and provides NO solutions. This helps no one and particularly doesn’t help you!

Instead, acknowledge, learn, and move on! And if able to have another go, apply what you have learned to get the “right” outcome.

Come on now, how important are your goals to you, really?

Because if your goals were critical to you, you would be making some pretty serious headway toward them by now, am I right?

So they can’t really be that important to you, can they? Or you would be having them in your sights real soon for sure…

Or are you still at the “about to start” stage? And you’ve been at this “about to start” stage for a fair while?

What’s holding you back from starting then?

Are you waiting for the “perfect moment” to appear before you start? Or are there a bunch of these justifiable excuses you keep making to yourself the real reason for holding you back?

Yes, we make excuses all the time and we back them up with good justification as to why they are “temporarily” suppressing our progress. Now whilst there are some genuinely important things that DO come up in life that will play havoc with any progress, they are fortunately few and far between.

Most of the time the reasons we give ourselves as show stoppers are very low on a scale of one to ten and don’t often make it about 4 out of 10 in criticality and we STILL let it get in the way.

If the issue you are experiencing is not a genuine 7 out of 10 and above (with death being at number 10) then you really need to evaluate whether the goals you have are really that important for you to achieve.

Because if any small distraction comes your way (and life has a habit of sending issues over because it’s called “living a life”) then we have to accept that they are mere distractions and nothing more and we have to navigate them as best we can and just move forward toward our goal.

Instead, we make excuses as to “why” we are not moving ahead as much as we had hoped and that is down to the flimsy nature of the excuses

So let’s look again at what we want to achieve and scale it on a scale of 1 to 10 on how important is it to achieve. Once you’ve established this, you need to throw out any poor excuse that isn’t worthy of the time of day, and just move forward

Otherwise, you will forever by justifying your failed attempts with poor excuses, one after the other, and looking at never to be achieved goals

We’ve heard this statement before, haven’t we? Well, it is actually a poor statement because it assumes a status quo and once something works, you’re done, never having to look at it again.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in reality. Just because you have a process or system that works, you can’t simply forget to look at it from time to time to see what can be “improved”.

After looking at it, you may still decide to keep things as they are, because they are working at their optimal current level, but you certainly DON’T think that once IT IS working, it no longer deserves the time and effort to assess whether any changes are required.

If you adopt this attitude, you will discover after a while that the process may be completely outdated, or there are more efficient ways of producing the same result. Or the other view is, whether some tasks can be reviewed and perhaps combined or even removed altogether.

Always look at what you’re doing with regularity and an open mind, to assess and then change it if needed.

So the attitude of “it ain’t broke, why fix it” is flawed thinking and can leave you scrambling to catch up, or worse, can put you out of business altogether if you are not looking at your systems and processes on a regular basis.

Most of the time, this isn’t you that is the issue at all, but the problem more than often lies with them.

Unless there is something huge that has happened that has adversely affected someone in a major way and you are genuinely the cause of this problem, there should be no real reason for someone to be purposely rude, aggressive, or angry toward someone else.

If this does happen, then is more likely a problem they are having personally than you the recipient of the anger.

They may be having challenges or issues that they are struggling with, and you are the next person they have come into contact with, and they have let loose on you. Or the pressure they are experiencing has built up over a period of time and that pressure is being released in your direction.

So don’t take things like this personally if you are confronted with someone who is rude and angry. Don’t blame yourself for sure, or believe that it is something you should have done differently.

Most often this anger is not directed at you personally anyway, but it could be directed at “anyone” that has happened to have crossed their path. Unfortunately, you are the one on the receiving end.

This doesn’t excuse them of course, nor should it, but as long as you realize this upfront, then you can shield yourself somewhat.

This way you are protecting your self-confidence understanding that the problem is not with you but with them.

This understanding can also dictate how you respond too. Because if you realize that the issue is not with you personally, but it is them just trying to “vent”, then your response can be measured and not be confrontational in return, and instead you can diffuse the anger rather than fuel it.