You are responsible for everything that happens to you — good, bad, or indifferent. If you blame others for where you’re at in life, you voluntarily give up your power to change. This is a huge mistake that most business owners make.

See, when I talk to them and they tell me all the reasons they’re encountering struggle, they blame everyone around them. They blame the economy, the government, their competitors, their employees. But this isn’t going to solve the problem.

And in the same market where they’re struggling, and all these people and all these things are the reasons they can’t succeed, there’s somebody growing unbelievably well, in the exact same market, doing the exact same thing. How is it that between two businesses doing the same thing, one could be struggling and failing and identify all the reasons that’s happening, and another one could be rolling in it, and expanding, and diversifying? Because they’re attracting to them what they want to accomplish, while the other business is attracting to them exactly the destiny they created for themselves.

The first business surrounds itself with exactly what it pictures: trial, tribulation, anxiety, stress, anger, fear, limitation. The second business is growing and exploding with excitement, attracting people to it and doing new and greater things in the community, doubling and tripling in size, and the owner’s getting written up in magazines. All these things are happening, and yet they do exactly the same thing.

Another business owner who’s telling you how bad it is? How their employees can’t help out? How managed care has taken away their ability to earn? How the government, taxes, economy kill them? You talk to people who have attained what it is you want to attain. Or you at the very least talk to people who are fighting each and every day with you and for you toward the attainment of your goals.

You cannot sit back and listen to people who are trying to move you off target.