E + R = O

Two weeks. Today is a test of the first thirteen days, and it's a kind one.

Jack Canfield taught high school history in Chicago, co-wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul, which was turned down by well over a hundred publishers before it sold a hundred million copies, and in 2005 wrote down sixty-four principles he had collected along the way in The Success Principles. The first one is the only one you need today, and he puts it first on purpose.

Take one hundred percent responsibility for your life. Not fifty. Not the part that was your fault. All of it, including what you do about the parts that were not.

He writes it as a formula. E + R = O. The event is what happened. The response is what you did, said, thought and chose. The outcome is where you are. If you don't like the outcome, you can wish the event had been different, which changes nothing, or you can change the response, which is the only lever you hold.

Canfield is careful here, and so am I. Responsibility is not blame. It is not pretending the event was fair. Some events are not fair, and saying so is honest. Responsibility is simply the refusal to hand the next move to the event.

He has people say the sentence out loud, with a straight face: "I am one hundred percent responsible for my life." Then he has them sit in the discomfort of it. The discomfort is the information. It tells you exactly where you've been keeping an exception, the one event you've decided gets to run the rest of the story.

Here's what I find hopeful about this key. The moment you take the R back, you have options. Three of them, usually, that you couldn't see while the E was in charge. That's not a burden. That's the door opening.