The most life changing advice I ever got

In my early 20s, I came across possibly the best self-development advice I've ever heard. You are responsible for everything. You've probably heard some version of this before. Everything that happens to you is your fault. The number one way to get happier is to take on 100% full accountability. Your life is your responsibility. Your happiness is your responsibility. Your success is your responsibility. Do you want to be a bitch today? Do you want to feel like a little bitch? Do you want to walk around all day knowing that you could but you didn't? No? It's one of the most widespread ideas in all of self-development. It's all on you. Your job, your health, your love life, your inability to use the standing desk you thought would be a total game changer. But as popular as this advice is, it's also polarizing, often misunderstood, and there are variations of it that are honestly pretty stupid. So I'm going to explore how taking personal responsibility can genuinely improve your life, but also its very real limitations. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. I'm gonna be honest, guys. This was supposed to be an easy one. A classic self-help video. Motivational, clean. Let's just give the people what they want. But the deeper that I went into this topic, and the more that my perfectionism came out, I realized that it's actually kind of complicated. So instead of pretending like this advice is either perfect or useless, I want to find the middle ground. I want to talk about why it's great, and also the areas for improvement. If you've read even a couple of self-development books, or scrolled self-help YouTube, you've probably come across this advice. As best-selling author Mark Manson wrote in a 2012 blog post, there is a realization from which all potential personal growth emerges. This is the realization that you are responsible for everything you do in your life, no matter the external circumstances. In other words, Just do it! Make your dreams come true! The idea isn't new. From ancient philosophy to modern self-help, from Holocaust survivors to Navy SEALs, some version of this advice has been passed down for centuries. And its promise is powerful. Take responsibility for everything, and it will improve your life, your circumstances, your mindset, and it might even get you laid. But according to today's wisdom, ownership isn't enough. You need extreme ownership. Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL and war commander, current podcaster and author, also a pretty intense guy. Let's put it this way, if anyone was ever in a room where his voice cracked, there would be no survivors. In his book Extreme Ownership, he argues that taking full ownership of everything is the foundation of effective leadership and long-term success, and that these same principles can even extend beyond leadership roles to apply to the individual. As Jocko writes in his book, As individuals, we often attribute success... Sorry, I'm actually... I'm just gonna play the excerpt from the audiobook. As individuals, we often attribute the success of others to luck or circumstances, and make excuses for our own failures and the failures of our team. We blame our own poor performance on bad luck, circumstances beyond our control, or poorly performing subordinates, anyone but ourselves. Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage. The reason this message of accountability resonates with millions of people who have read books by people like Jocko, David Goggins, or Gary Vee is because it's often easier to blame external factors for our failures than to look at ourselves. 100% ownership is a correction for the rise of the victim mindset. It helps you stop identifying yourself as a victim, even if you've been victimized in the past, and start taking accountability for what you can do to change your circumstances. Until you change the internal dialogue in your head, until you callous over the victim's mentality that the world is out to get you, you're going to stay in the same exact spot that you're in. One of the reasons this advice is so powerful and so difficult to follow is because it forces you to recognize some uncomfortable truths about yourself. In my early 20s, I struggled a lot, as you do as someone in your early 20s. I struggled to create consistent exercise habits to eat better. I had crippling dating anxiety. I literally didn't go on a date for a five-year stretch. When you look back at a younger version of myself, my early attempts at self-development were pretty fraught. But then I heard this advice. Do you want to start lifting more? It's on you. Do you want to eat right? It's on you. Do you want to feel better? Find love, get out of debt, build a business. No one is coming to save you. You're going to have to figure it out yourself. It's on you. I think that there's something powerful, motivating, and even freeing about this advice. In this moment, and it wasn't like just one moment, it wasn't like a light bulb moment. I think it took me years to really start to embody this advice. But I did realize that so many of the things that I was struggling with, I was getting in my own way. I was coming up with excuses for why I couldn't find time to train or stick to a new habit or to eat better. Suddenly, I stopped waiting for permission or for support or for that magical hit of motivation to come. And I started taking steps towards my goals. If you say everything is my fault, you get optimistic in knowing that you can then fix it. It's a big deal. And for me, it paid off. I put on over 20 pounds of muscle. I resolved my dating anxiety and found love. I built a successful filmmaking business, and I even got out of debt. It's a convincing case study in personal responsibility. Even if you've been wronged, faced misfortune, or injustices, this is the path to success, happiness, and love. Except that's not the full story. There were other factors that contributed to these outcomes outside of this quippy self-help mantra. And maybe, just maybe, it wasn't all on me. More on that in a minute. But first, please support my channel by watching this short clip about Squarespace. The creator economy is moving really fast. And honestly, it can be a little bit overwhelming to try to keep up with everything. It's hard to separate the noise and the hype from the tools that are actually valuable. One platform that I think has done an excellent job of not only innovating, but continuing to deliver amazing value is Squarespace. I love Squarespace, not because they magically do the work for you, but because they do three simple things really well. First, they make it incredibly easy to build your own website. You answer a few prompts, get a solid first draft done, and then if you're anything like me, you tweak it until it's perfect. And then you tweak it just a little bit more. Second, it's more than just a website builder. You can manage your domain, publish blog posts, track analytics, run an online store, and even book clients all in one place. And third, and probably the most overlooked one, they're reliable. When I'm launching a course or sending a lot of traffic to my site, I need to know that it's going to hold up. In over 10 years of using Squarespace, I've never had to worry about that. From major traffic spikes to everyday use, my site has always been up. If you want to see why I trust Squarespace with all my websites, then go to squarespace.com to start your free trial. And then when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash Matt D'Avella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. I spent a lot of time, probably too much time, listening to as much advice on personal responsibility as I could to make this video. And I think there are some very subtle but clear problems with how it's shared. And these problems leave people misunderstanding the message, I think in the most generous sense, or rightly being pissed off by how it's being shared. I think one of the problems is that a lot of people interchange words like responsibility, fault, blame, and accountability, all as if they mean the same exact thing. Everything that happens to you is your fault. Everything that goes wrong in my life, I take full responsibility for. The number one way to get happier is to take on 100% full accountability. There was only one person to blame. And that person was me. One version of this advice that is very popular, and I think the most problematic is everything is your fault. I think it's popular because it's extreme. It's a clear symptom of self-help hyperbole. And it's really more marketing than truth. The reason I believe that I'm happy is because I think everything's my fault. It's not the government or your parents' fault. It's they've put you in certain situations. They've put you in certain situations kind of sounds like maybe it wasn't your fault. But you have the strength and capacity to make it better. So is it true or even helpful to say that everything is your fault? In my opinion, no, definitely not. And my evidence, I mean, have you looked around? We live in a society that is so clearly unfair. The gap between what the 1% have and the rest of the world have is growing faster than ever. Wealth among the 99% is shrinking, and it's not because they're working less. People are getting more obese, and it's not because something has fundamentally changed about our willpower. People are spending more hours scrolling on our phone, and it's not because something about our brains has changed. What makes humans human hasn't changed. It's our environment and circumstances that have. We see rates of depression and anxiety and suicide and loneliness going up among young people. This is the world we're trying to practice self-development in. When we are struggling with something in our lives, we're told that's on you. But that's not entirely fair and doesn't acknowledge the real challenges people are faced with. It puts the entirety of the blame on the individual when it's much more nuanced than that. Obviously, not everything that happens to us is our fault. If I'm walking down the street and I get punched in the face by a random stranger, is that my fault? Sure, maybe I could have stayed home. Maybe I could have kept my guard up at all times. All right, maybe I shouldn't have been wearing a t-shirt that said, please punch me in the face. This advice is problematic because it treats all outcomes as if they were fully within your control, ignoring luck, circumstances, and the actions of others. While it can sound empowering, it often turns into guilt, pushing people to blame themselves for things they didn't cause rather than focusing on what they can realistically change. When Mark Manson talks about this idea, he draws a clear line between fault and responsibility. Here's his explanation from my interview with him last year. Fault is generally external and it's past tense. Responsibility is always present and future tense. So it's like the fault is like, okay, this thing happened. I had no control over it. The responsibility kicks in of like, how am I going to react to this? What is my mindset? How am I going to choose to move forward? And that is ever present in every moment, no matter what happens. I think when most people say you are responsible for everything in your life, they aren't saying you are to blame for everything that happened to you. They're saying you're responsible for how you respond. Even Jocko Willink offered up a more nuanced version of personal responsibility when asked if it's possible to take on too much ownership. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is whether it's possible to take too much responsibility or too much ownership where you start to believe that you're at fault or you're accountable for things and blame yourself too frequently, blame yourself too much. There's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over. You know, like for instance, someone gets a terrible disease or their kids gets a terrible disease. No, there's nothing you can do about that. What you can take ownership of is how you respond to that situation. Most of the time, or much of the time, people say that's not my fault. There's nothing I can do about that. And more often than people think, there is something you can do about it. The Stoics, you may have heard of them. Pretty cool guys. They knew long ago that there are things in your life that you can control. Your beliefs, your character, your actions and effort. And then there are things you can't control. External events, other people, society, even the outcomes of your actions. They didn't believe you are responsible for everything. They believed you are responsible for everything you can control. You can't force your partner to stop being mad at you, but you can take responsibility for how you communicate, whether you listen, how you regulate your emotions and whether you show up honestly and with care instead of defensiveness. Therapist Emma McAdam breaks down how to develop a healthier relationship with control using a clinically grounded approach. The world's messed up. There's bad people in the world. There's discrimination. There's all of this stuff that makes our lives harder. But when our energy is consumed by what we can't control, it's going to perpetuate these feelings of helplessness. But when we channel our efforts into areas where we do have agency, where we do have power, where we can influence something, we can build power and resilience. So a healthy locus of control is when you acknowledge the things you can't change and you focus all your energy on the things you can. It's important to be honest about the forces working against you. Luck, timing, systems, and other people all shape outcomes in ways you can't control. Recognizing that can free you from shame. But don't become consumed by these things. Don't let them stop you from taking responsibility for all the things you can control. Our problems might be unique to our time, and maybe it's true that we're more f***ed than past generations. But what's the alternative? To throw our hands in the air, say life's not fair, and give up? It may not be easy or straightforward, and you may not have the perfect solution right now. But if you want to improve your life, you need to start with the belief that you can change. And at its core, I think that's what made this message so powerful to me in the first place.