Lessons for a father - Who Do You Work For?

Never stop writing your own story, your own way. – When writing the story of your life, never, ever let someone else hold the pen.  Make conscious choices every day that align your actions with your values and ambitions.  Because the way you live each day is a sentence in the story of your life.  Each day you make a choice as to whether the sentence ends with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point.

I read this on a blog called Marc and Angel Hack Life (here is the link). It struck a cord because of a belief that I have always had. We all are answerable only to ourselves.

Let us work on the premise that belief is true. Can we, then, allow anyone else to determine how we lead our lives? Can we surrender ourselves to someone else's idea of how we should succeed and fail? No. But a lot of us do that almost daily.

We use phrases like "they told me to do it that way" or better still "we have always done it that way".

What we do, when we pass the ownership of an event or of a decision on to someone else is give them control over ourselves. We convince ourselves that someone, superior than us, at least in our minds, has a better chance of making us successful. We therefore, at some level, hold the belief that its those others that we work for.

Is that really the case though? Aren't we, all of us, working really for ourselves? Don't we represent our own fears, values and aspirations? Why then would we be willing to hand over the remote control of our lives to others, even for a moment? Yet, we all do it. Why?

I think we do it because it is easy. We do it because as long as "it is not our fault" when goals are not met we are fine. We do it because we are scared of failure and have never thought about rebounding from one. We do it because we hate conflict. We do it because we do not want to show our vulnerability. We do it because we want to do it.

Think about it. We believe in God because we want to. We work on becoming good citizens or leaders or parents because we want to. We win because we want to and,  sometimes, we lose because we want to. 

We become what we want to become. So how is it that somewhere on the path towards our goal, we let someone else reset our goals and paths for us? We fail ourselves by doing that.

Let us start a trend then. Today and now. Let us ask ourselves if what we are about to do taking us even a step closer to our goal. If it is, we should go ahead and do it. If not, we should not. Let us wrest back control of our lives from whoever we have given it to and become owners of our own destinies.

While doing that let us ask ourselves every day: Who do you work for? If the answer is anything but "Myself", it might be time to rethink. 

What else do you think we can do to take back ownership of our lives and decisions?