In this age of heightened information, the power is not in possessing knowledge, but in taking immediate action, accepting full responsibility for our happiness and for the realization of our dreams.
Throughout history, few have been the chronological moments that, due to their apparent grandeur, we have clothed with the mysticism and transcendence with which we have adorned the beginning of the new millennium. Moments like this often offer us an inescapable opportunity to come to a halt in the resounding race of life, and thoroughly evaluate the advances, changes or setbacks that we have experienced personally, as a society, or as part of this beautiful and turbulent planet. Making use of this very prophetic opportunity for philosophizing and prophesying, I have decided to examine an area to which I have dedicated the last eight years of my life: success. With the 21st century around the corner, I decided to analyze the history of humanity in search of the answer to one of my biggest questions.
It seems that sometime along the timeline connecting the caveman's appearance and today, something very strange happened. Little by little people began to lose control of their lives. It is as if we have suddenly forgotten the inner power that every person possesses to exercise control over their own destiny. Or it is possible that what has really happened is that for some reason, perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps because we find it easy to do, we begin to yield much of the responsibility for our personal success to external sources. It is as if we have voluntarily decided to give up playing our role in achieving our own dreams, perhaps out of hopelessness, fear, laziness, or simply out of cowardice.
Possibly it all began when ancient civilizations began to believe and accept that their success, their personal well-being and their individual happiness depended on the king, emperor, conqueror or monarch of the day, and that if they paid homage to him and paid tribute to him, he, in turn, had to take responsibility for responding to the needs of his subjects. However, even after regaining many of the lost freedoms and basic human rights, such as the right to liberty, happiness, and free will, many people continued to allow that responsibility to rest outside of them, with the hope that someday, someone, somewhere and in some way, would create the circumstances that would allow them to be happy and to be successful.
For those of you who may be wondering by now if I am not taking this position too far, let me ask you a question: How many of you know at least one person who at some point, trying to explain a failure, has not pointed his finger?, looking around for guilty?
So deeply buried in our subconscious is this attitude that most people have a varied arsenal of justifications, excuses, myths, lies, assumptions, and excuses to justify any misstep. Interestingly, the one thing all of these apologies have in common is that they place the guilt outside of themselves. For the mediocre person, their failure is the result of discrimination, the system, a lack of love from their family, support from friends, the envy of others, or simply a lack of opportunities.. The less daring blame fate, while the more sophisticated blame the economic situation, the political system or global trends. Many even blame God for their misadventures.
The truth is that it is easy to rationalize our mediocrity and find guilty for our failures, if we have accepted beforehand that the responsibility for our success and personal happiness is not entirely ours. However, regardless of which excuse we choose to use to justify our mediocrity, there are three clear elements about all of them:
If we put ourselves in the task of finding an excuse, we will surely find it.
If we make excuses, we will surely find allies, who join our cause, or at least people who believe them.
Giving excuses does not change the reality of the circumstances that we seek to justify with them.
So after many years of waiting in vain for someone to do something for our happiness, after many years of being tired, after many years of demanding justice and asking for opportunities from the comfort of our favorite armchair in front of the television and finding every excuse It is possible, we have arrived in front of the greatest of all the paradigms about happiness and success in the new millennium:
One hundred percent of the responsibility for our success lies with ourselves. We must look inward and not outward, in search of responsibility, and the answers to the problems or circumstances that we may be facing. In this age of heightened information, the power is not in possessing knowledge, but in taking immediate action, accepting full responsibility for our happiness and for the realization of our dreams.
The poet Amado Nervo said well, "because I see, at the end of my rough path, that I was the architect of my own destiny." Now, once we accept the fact that the responsibility for our happiness is totally ours, the first step is to determine what it consists of, for each one of us.
