The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it. Often people think the world should work differently than it does, and when they donât get the outcomes they want, they try to wiggle out of responsibility by blaming other people or their circumstances. Avoiding responsibility is a recipe for misery, and the opposite of what it takes to cultivate good judgment.
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One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. Anytime you find yourself or your colleague complaining âthatâs not right,â or âthatâs not fair,â or âit shouldnât be that way,â you are bargaining, not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesnât.
Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results donât materialize, itâs easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. Youâre focused on your ego not the outcome.
Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. Thatâs because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.
Facing reality is hard. Itâs much easier to blame things we have no control over than look for our own contributions.
Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we donât have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.
Complaining isnât productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesnât. Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.
There are points in the process of becoming a chronic victim when people realize theyâre lying to themselves. They realize the story theyâre telling themselves isnât quite true. They know theyâre responsible. But facing reality and taking responsibility is hard. Itâs uncomfortable. Itâs so much easier to hide and to blame other people, circumstances, or luck.
Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. Itâs tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but thatâs not how it typically works.
We unconsciously become what weâre near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later youâll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later youâll become selfish. If you hang around someone whoâs unkind, youâll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.
Lerner argued as follows: To feel comfortable in the world, we need to believe the world is basically justâ that generally people get what they deserve. Thus when we see a person suffering for little reason, it upsets us by implying that maybe the world isnât just. And to restore that injured image, we might actually derogate such a victimâ blame them for their sufferingâ as a way of restoring our needed belief that the world is just, and that people do in fact get what they deserve.
In one of the most surprising findings in the history of social psychology, this is just what happened. Subjects derogated the victim, downgrading her personality and character.