Blaming Circumstances

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.  

Jim Rohn

We all from time to time face difficult problems, situations and circumstances. Whether it be in our personal lives, the business world and our jobs, or what to do in the marketplace. Our natural tendency is to blame the circumstances that surround us for the particular difficulty we are presently facing. Everything I know about the market said it was supposed to go down and it went up instead. How could I possibly have known this or that would happen?

One of the hardest lessons, to not only learn, but accept and understand; is that circumstances are not negative or positive, circumstances are neutral. It is our thinking, our perspective, that make circumstances either positive or negative. Try and think of these difficult circumstance in this vain, - "Everything in the universe has its opposite." There is a North Pole and its opposite is the South Pole. If you live 150 miles from New York City, then it must be 150 miles from New York City to where you live. If something you considered bad happens in your life, there has to be something good about it.

If you suffered a loss on a trade or series of trades, you have probably gained a good deal of knowledge as to the why, and you have probably gained even more knowledge about controlling risk. The gains in knowledge, over time, will far out balance the loss or losing streak you have just suffered, by rewarding you in the future.

I hope it's clear, that every circumstance can be viewed in two ways. And it's the way we view the circumstance that determines its impact on our thinking and our mental state. No matter how bad the circumstance appears to be, taking another look, from another perspective, will reveal the potential good. 

Napoleon Hill, author of the classic "Think and Grow Rich," wrote, "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit."