Own Your Outcomes

Own Your Outcomes

What if I told you that everything that has ever happened to you—good, bad, and ugly—is your own damn fault?

Before you get your defenses up, take a breath. This isn’t about blame. It’s about freedom. It’s about taking back the power you’ve been giving away your entire life. It’s about understanding that you are the single most powerful force in your own universe. Nobody is coming to save you. Your results, every single one of them, are yours. This is the core of radical responsibility, and it is the only path to radical freedom.

The Problem: The Epidemic of Finger-Pointing

We live in a culture of victimhood. It’s a comfortable, seductive trap. Your business failed? It was the economy. Your relationship ended? Your ex was a narcissist. You’re out of shape? It’s your genetics. We have become masters of outsourcing responsibility, creating intricate narratives where we are the perpetually wronged hero in a story written by external forces. We blame our parents, our bosses, the government, the weather—anything and anyone to avoid the searing discomfort of looking in the mirror.

This is the mindset of the Backward-Looking Person, the BLP. The BLP is obsessed with the past. They live in a world of “should haves” and “if onlys.” They are professional excuse-makers, convinced that their present misery is the direct result of a past they cannot change. They see the world as something that happens to them, not something they create. And in doing so, they render themselves completely powerless. They are leaves in the wind, tossed about by circumstances, forever waiting for a favorable breeze that will never come. Bullshit.

The Application: From Victim to Creator

So what does a 19th-century physics law have to do with your shitty job or your expanding waistline? Everything.

When you blame the economy for your business failing, you are acting like a system in equilibrium. You are assuming a static, unchanging world. You are being a BLP. The Forward-Looking Person (FLP), on the other hand, understands that the environment is always changing. The FLP sees the economic downturn not as a personal attack, but as a shift in the landscape. They don’t waste energy complaining about the past. They adapt. They pivot. They look for the new opportunities that chaos always creates. They own the outcome, learn the lesson, and move on, stronger and smarter.

I’ve lived this. When my first company, Weedmaps, was in its infancy, we were constantly on the verge of collapse. We were sued, raided, and relentlessly attacked by competitors and the government. It would have been easy to throw in the towel and blame the system. It would have been easy to say, “The world just isn’t ready for this.” But that’s the victim’s way out. Instead, we embraced the chaos. Every attack, every lawsuit, every threat was a new piece of information. It was the environment telling us how to adapt. We learned to be more resilient, more creative, and more determined. We owned every single setback, and in doing so, we owned our eventual success.

This applies to every corner of your life. Your relationship is struggling? Stop cataloging your partner’s flaws. That’s a backward-looking, entropic activity. Instead, look at the system. What are your inputs? Are you communicating effectively? Are you creating an environment of trust and respect? You can’t change another person, but you can change your own actions. And when you change your actions, you change the entire dynamic. You introduce new energy into the system, creating the possibility for a new, more ordered state to emerge.

Your health is failing? Stop blaming your genetics or your busy schedule. Those are just variables in a complex equation. You are the one who decides what to eat. You are the one who decides whether to move your body or sit on the couch. You are the one who controls the inputs. Taking radical responsibility doesn’t mean that it’s your “fault” you got sick, but it does mean that it’s your responsibility to do everything in your power to get well. It’s about shifting from a passive recipient of fate to an active creator of your own health.

The Takeaway: Your Three-Step Action Plan

Understanding this intellectually is one thing. Living it is another. Here’s how you start.

1. Conduct a Radical Responsibility Audit. Pick one area of your life where you feel stuck or victimized. A recent failure, a frustrating relationship, a goal you can’t seem to reach. Now, grab a piece of paper and write down every single way you contributed to this outcome. Be brutally honest. What did you do? What did you not do? What choices did you make? What warnings did you ignore? This isn’t about self-flagellation. It’s about identifying your power. Once you see your role, you can change your strategy.

2. Practice “Time Tense” Awareness. Listen to the way you talk and think. How often do you use the past tense to justify the present? “I can’t do X because Y happened.” This is the language of the BLP. When you catch yourself doing this, consciously reframe it in the present tense. “Given that Y happened, what am I going to do now?” This simple shift yanks your brain out of the past and forces it to focus on the only thing you can control: the present moment.

3. Become an Information Seeker. Stop seeing challenges as personal attacks. They are not. They are simply information. The universe is giving you data about what’s working and what’s not. Your job is to be a scientist in the laboratory of your own life. Get curious. When something goes wrong, ask: “What is this teaching me? What is the opportunity here?” The more you seek information in the chaos, the better you will become at adapting and creating the outcomes you want.

The Choice is Yours

Ultimately, this is what it all boils down to: you can be a product of your circumstances, or you can be the creator of your reality. You can be a Backward-Looking Person, forever trapped in a past that no longer exists, or you can be a Forward-Looking Person, constantly adapting and evolving toward a future of your own design.

There is no middle ground. There is no “mostly” responsible. You either take it all, or you get nothing. The moment you stop blaming, you start growing. The moment you own your outcomes, you own your life.