If you forget to do your homework, tell your teacher the truth and promise that it will never happen again
You are totally responsible for your life. This is the foundational principle you must embrace if you plan for happiness and success in your life and work. For many people, everything is someone else’s fault. Every problem can be explained away with reasons why they can’t affect the situation or the outcome, especially at work where it is easy to find excuses because people are so closely intertwined.
Every failure has a scapegoat that they can use to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions—failure is never the result of the choices they made.
But without taking responsibility, you're all the more likely to look at your career as a failure because you allowed any passing wind to blow you around, all the while blaming the wind for how things turned out. When you fail to responsibly guide your direction and outcomes, you set the stage for creating a miserable life—a life that fulfills none of your dreams and aspirations.
Make No Excuses
Excuses for failure, excuses about your choices in life, excuses about what you feel you have accomplished—and what you have not--fuel dysfunctional thinking and consequently, undesirable actions and behaviors.
Making excuses instead of taking one hundred percent responsibility for your actions, your thoughts, and your goals are the hallmark of people who fail to succeed both in their professional lives and personal lives.
Part of the power of taking responsibility for your actions is that you silence the negative, unhelpful voice in your head. When you spend your thinking time on success and goal accomplishment, instead of on making excuses, you free up the emotional space formerly inhabited by negativity.
This is especially true as that negative voice in your head will run endless tapes of dissatisfaction and rehearse negative, unsatisfying outcomes over and over and over again—ad nauseum.