ABOUT ARVIND
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If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take 100% responsibility
for your life as well. That means giving up all your excuses, all your victim stories, all the reasons why
you can’t and why you haven’t up until now, and all your blaming of outside circumstances. You
have to give them all up forever.
You have to take the position that you have always had the power to make it different, to get it right,
to produce the desired result. For whatever reason—ignorance, lack of awareness, fear, needing to be
right, the need to feel safe—you chose not to exercise that power. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter.
The past is the past. All that matters now is that from this point forward you choose—that’s right, it’s
a choice—you choose to act as if (that’s all that’s required—to act as if) you are 100% responsible
for everything that does or doesn’t happen to you.
If something doesn’t turn out as planned, you will ask yourself, “How did I create that? What was I
thinking? What were my beliefs? What did I say or not say? What did I do or not do to create that
result? How did I get the other person to act that way? What do I need to do differently next time to
get the result I want?”
A few years after I met Mr. Stone, Dr. Robert Resnick, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, taught me
a very simple but very important formula that made this idea of 100% responsibility even clearer to
me. The formula is:
E + R = O
(Event + Response = Outcome)
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or
poverty, health or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or frustration) is the result of how you have
responded to an earlier event or events in your life.
If you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two basic choices you can make.
1. You can blame the event (E) for your lack of results (O). In other words, you can blame the
economy, the weather, the lack of money, your lack of education, racism, gender bias, the current
administration in Washington, your wife or husband, your boss’s attitude, the lack of support, the
political climate, the system or lack of systems, and so on. If you’re a golfer, you’ve probably
even blamed your clubs and the course you played on. No doubt all these factors do exist, but if
they were the deciding factor, nobody would ever succeed.
Jackie Robinson would never have played major league baseball, Sidney Poitier and Denzel
Washington would have never become movie stars, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would
never have become U.S. senators, Erin Brockovich would never have uncovered PG&E’s
contamination of the water in Hinkley, California, Bill Gates would never have founded
Microsoft, and Steve Jobs would never have started Apple Computers. For every reason why it’s
not possible, there are hundreds of people who have faced the same circumstances and succeeded.
Lots of people overcome these so-called limiting factors, so it can’t be the limiting factors that
limit you. It is not the external conditions and circumstances that stop you—it is you! We stop
ourselves! We think limiting thoughts and engage in self-defeating behaviors. We defend our self-
destructive habits (such as drinking and smoking) with indefensible logic. We ignore useful
feedback, fail to continuously educate ourselves and learn new skills, waste time on the trivial
aspects of our lives, engage in idle gossip, eat unhealthy food, fail to exercise, spend more money
than we make, fail to invest in our future, avoid necessary conflict, fail to tell the truth, don’t ask
for what we want—and then wonder why our lives don’t work. But this, by the way, is what most
people do. They place the blame for everything that isn’t the way they want it on outside events
and circumstances. They have an excuse for everything.