[llambda]

No, it's not your fault. And this is just a mechanism of deflection.

Step back from your solipsistic convictions for five minutes and realize that your rationalizations here only serve the purpose of avoiding forgiveness. You have decided that not only are you not a victim but in fact you and you alone are responsible for everything and therefore you don't ever need to forgive anyone. Moreover you have now implicitly made the rest of the world victims. Hm...

[SoftwareMaven]

The real world is somewhere in the middle. Many people do excuse their own weaknesses by becoming the victim of everybody else's evil. It is important to recognize when you really are a contributing factor. Sometimes, you really are at fault.

On the other hand, I read this part and realized the OP had jumped the shark:

Someone was rude to me today? My fault. I could have lightened their mood beforehand.

It's your fault if you aren't psychic? It's your fault if others can't have common decency? No, at that point, you are looking for a way to say that you control the entire world. I completely agree with my parent's choice of wording: solipsism.

Spend time meditating and introspecting. Talk with objective third parties. It is important for you to learn when you screwed up and how to not screw up in the future.

But don't forget that people are agents unto themselves. Sometimes they do stupid, mean, and ignorant things. If you don't learn to forgive those actions, you will either carry a lot of guilt (How could I let my friend be mugged because I didn't catch an earlier flight home? It's my fault!) or a lot of anger (All muggers must die!). There is a peaceful middle ground that enables you to work on solving the systemic problems without idealizing away the smaller percentage of outright bad actors.

So, no, it's not your fault.

[PieSquared]

I think interpreting these posts in the literal manner that you and the grandparent are doing is a bit misleading. If you read what the OP wrote in the most literal manner, he sounds like a nutjob. You're right - there's no way to say that it's his fault that everything happens. What if a stranger had a bad day for his own reasons, and decided to use that as an excuse to be rude to the OP? Or someone broke into his house and stole something? There's plenty of scenarios where logically it cannot be his fault that something happened. ("Global warming! It's all my fault!")

But that's not what he means, and not really what he's writing about. The way I read this, he's proposing a shift in world view. People are difficult and unpredictable creatures, but, if I were smart enough, I would understand how they work. I could have been smart enough or empathetic enough to realize this stranger had a bad day, and say something nice to him to cheer him up. I could have been smart enough to get a better security system for my house. If I really cared about global warming, I could try to become a U.S. senator (or some other powerful politician) and try to change it.

By saying, "It's my fault", what the OP means is, "If I really cared about this, and was smart/strong/etc enough, I could have worked to fix/prevent this". This isn't about "[controlling] the entire world". It's about believing that you have control over your life, and about realizing that blaming others (whether in an angry or forgiving sense) is entirely useless in terms of practicality. If you blame others for anything, you're saying that there's nothing you could've done, and letting others determine your life.

I understand that in some regards, this is a bit silly. It's not my fault that someone had a bad day, and it's not my fault that I don't know them well enough to make them feel better. It's not my fault they were rude to me. But I'd rather pretend it's my fault and think about ways that I could handle the situation better in the future than just blame it on external forces and allow myself to repeat the same mistakes.

[stdbrouw]

I used to feel and act exactly like Derek: let's just pretend everything is my fault because that's how I will learn to be better regardless of whether other people could have been better too.

What I've started noticing, though, is that after doing this for a couple of years, when it's become automatic, it gets difficult to differentiate between "for the sake of learning, let's assume this is my fault" and "this is actually my fault". And at that point, it's hard not to get depressed in the face of adversity... after all, it's all your fault.

I've started blaming other people more – mind you, from a baseline of never doing so – and it has done wonders for my well-being and self-esteem.

So, yeah, it's a good trick, but do your very best to keep in mind it's only a trick.

Also, it's interesting to compare Sivers' heuristic with that of Martin Seligman ("Learned Optimism") who recommends that while you shouldn't necessarily avoid taking blame, you should try to compartmentalize it as much as possible and never assume your failings are due to some fundamental flaw in your character.

[drumdance]

I think it comes down to "failure" vs. "feedback." I don't look at a negative encounter as a failure. It's just feedback.

I ask myself, in a non-judging way, "what could I have done differently?" Sometimes the answer is "nothing" - you just caught someone on a bad day. But sometimes there are some things I can change about my behavior. If so, I try to incorporate that and go forward.

Whatever happened has already happened. You can't go back and change it, so there's no point in ruminating on it. But you can change how you behave in the future, and that's what a lesson is for.

[gnarizard]

This was my reaction as well. My default behavior for years has been to assume everything as my fault. The big turn for me occurred a few months after my ex cheated and I ended the relationship. I kept thinking, "What did I do that made her want to cheat?" But that's a very misguided question. Her behavior was completely outside my control. Eventually I was able to simply accept that it wasn't my fault, and it significantly improved my emotional health.

I get that OP isn't being completely literal or universal. But there is a whole class of neurotic self-blamers out there that could stand to learn the opposite lesson: some things are not your fault.

[SoftwareMaven]

I actually would have read it exactly like you did, if he hadn't included the examples. I was shaken by the girlfriend example. It is certainly possible it was all Derek's fault, but few relationships ever end solely because of one person alone and I think you limit what you can learn if you don't recognize that. How do you learn what we're negative reactions to your negative actions things you really did wrong) versus negative reactions to your positive actions (the things that, if you change, will turn you into a co-dependent person)?

However, the "rude to me" example put it over the edge. At that point, it really doesn't read as "really introspect and figure out what I did wrong". Instead, it reads as "literally everything is my fault". And nothing in the article softened that view.

Derek commented elsewhere he agrees with you, so I'm not here second-guessing how he feels. I do think, however, that somebody coming in and taking this as advice for how to live could wind up in a world of hurt.

I buy "A whole lot of the crap that happens to me is my fault (much more than I give credit to)", but "It's all my fault" is wrong and dangerous.

[sivers]

Andrew/π² - Right on. That's what I meant. Thanks much for explaining it better than I did.

[Spearchucker]

Nothing is as black and white as being one's fault or not.

Sun Tzu figured out the sphere of influence over 2,000 years ago - you don't control the weather, but you can take an umbrella.

Interestingly enough, the things OP cites are indeed things he had at least a degree of control over before they came to the results he mentions.

I found the post refreshingly insightful.

[smsm42]

You can still forgive anyone, including yourself (sometimes the hardest). I think the point of the exercise though is to concentrate on what you can do to fix it or prevent it from happening next time, not on wrongs done to you by others - real or imaginary, where you can not fix it and only thing you can do is feel bad about other people.

Let's get the $9000 example. If you were cheated out of $9000, you can stop at "this guy was a con artist" and just feel bad. Or you can say "I have to do these and these checks next time somebody asks me for $9000" - and then next con artist maybe won't get that lucky with you. Because you can't change how next guy behaves, but you can change how you behave.

[ivosaurus]

Yep. A hell of a lot of commenters here seem to think the OP is simply about taking up an unhealthy mindset on your worldview of events.

But it's not about the initial worldview (i.e the title of the post), but how it enables you to view things, and act on them, in consequence.

Striving to take more action on the things you care about is practically never a bad things, and that's what Derek is wanting to achieve, not single-handedly shoulder the entire world's problems by claiming himself the sole contributor of all of its events.

[jasonlotito]

What's your opinion based on? Because Derek's is documented over and over again. Most famously in the 7 Habits book. You can blame everyone else for your failures, or you can take responsibility and understand that you have influence.

It doesn't mean you can put everyone on yourself. However, it's the difference between saying you don't have a job because of the government, and you don't have a job because you spent no time improving your situation.

> You have decided that not only are you not a victim but in fact you and you alone are responsible for everything and therefore you don't ever need to forgive anyone.

The reality is, you are misrepresenting what is being said. Maybe it's just ignorance. But the lesson is simple: you can either blame other people on your problems (which will never be productive), or you can work and see what you can do to solve these problems (which will always be productive). If this means forgiving someone for a failure, that's what you do.

That is much different than blaming someone.

[davidkatz]

I believe this misses the point. We have significant influence over almost everything that happens to us. For example, when a deal goes sour both parties could most likely have prevented it. Important - this does mean we live in a hopelessly relativistic world, and leaves ample room for clear convictions about who did what wrong.

The point is that even if the other party acted a lot more 'wrong' than I did, it is still surprisingly often true that I could have completely prevented it. Furthermore, I am significantly more responsible for avoiding damage to me than someone else is. Once you realize that, an attitude of 'everything is my fault' naturally follows, and I applaud it.

EDIT: slightly shortened

[DividesByZero]

In other words, fundamental attribution bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

There are of course extremes though - it may be the case that you are not responsible for everything that goes on, but the CEO of a company is responsible for the culture, politics and other things the author mentions.

[gdltec]

Derek, you need to move on and let the past be there, in the past. All the stuff you are writing about is about the same thing that happened years ago and we all know about it. It's time to move on, we want to know what's next.

[sivers]

Agreed! But most everything I write about will be in the past. I'm a slow learner.

I figure my current experiences are not very valuable to others. It's only valuable once I've learned something sharable from it, and that usually only happens in hindsight.

[gdltec]

You have done much better than many of us, allow us to decide if your current experiences are valuable or not... you have always been a source of motivation to a lot of people, keep the positive attitude.

[bpatrianakos]

Thank you for this. I can't believe anyone would applaud this mindset. For some reason we seem to applaud extremist views here and don't stop to think about how practical or unhealthy they are. There's a small minority of the population that has found success in being extreme in some way but we are not those people. We want to be though. We want to be the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk or the Richard Stallman that has these eccentricities, these rare and extreme personality traits, these strongly held views and model ourselves after them all the while thinking "if he can do it, so can I" and duping ourselves into believing these things are okay. That we'll be the lucky ones who are able to pull it off. And when someone with a little star power like TBray says something like this we want to jump all over it because we believe that this will help us make it to the top and be like them.

But it won't. These people have some great advice and knowledge to share and I, like the rest of us, are more than willing to take it in and implement it but an article like this is dangerous and not good advice. But it's hard to recognize that when it comes from someone prominent because if they're so successful and they think like that then logic dictates that if we do it too we'll have an advantage, right? Not always. Each of us perceives the world differently and we gt by in our own unique way. I guarantee that if any one of us normals became prominent figured and successful in startup culture then there'd be stories and legends of some obscure thing we do that made us successful. I'd also be willing to bet we write about some of those things and people would cling to every word, applaud it, and think to themselves "I've gotta try that!" whether it was a good idea or not. It's not that anyone is trying to give bad advice, it's just that we don't know it.

[cma]

You can find a more balanced/nuanced approach in David Foster Wallace's This is Water:

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

[j_baker]

There's no other way to put this, so I'm just going to come out and say it: you're not only flat out wrong, you've got the truth backwards.

Forgiving people implies that said person has done something to wrong you. Thus, you're still placing the blame on other people. Research has shown that blaming others is ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.

The best approach: forgive yourself. Accept that you've done something wrong (even if you didn't realize it at the time), figure out what you could have done to prevent it, and then get over it. Life's too short to play the blame game, even with yourself.