Success Principles: Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

Today I start posting my summary of "Success Principles"

I’ve learned about the success principles from Jack Canfield. In his book “The Success Principles”, Jack Canfield presents the sixty-four principles which, if learned and practiced, can help everyone to realize their goals.

The principles that he teaches are timeless. He did not invent them, but collected them from many successful people. He has learned and practiced them himself, and has presented them in his excellent book. He was able to present the great knowledge in a clear and easy to understand way.

I’ve chosen and briefly described the ten principles from Canfield’s book which I think are most important.

Today let's read about the first and in my opinion the most important principle:

Take100% Responsibility for Your Life

The first principle states that there is only one person who is 100% responsible for my life-it is me.

This is the first principle of success. If we want to be successful in life, we first have to take total responsibility for our lives. We’re responsible for all our successes and failures, health, relationships, financial situation, our feelings and everything else.

It is me who has created the life I am living now so I must take full responsibility for it. If I don’t take full responsibility, I can’t achieve things which are important to me and I can’t re-make my life.

To really take 100% responsibility for our lives, we must stop blaming others for our problems and failures. We have created our current situations by our thoughts and activities so there is no reason to blame anybody. We can blame only ourselves, but that is also useless because the past is the past; we can’t change it. But now we can create our future. We have always had the power to do it, but for different reasons we haven’t. Now we can do things differently and get the results we want. This is because of the rule: E+R=0(Event +Response=Outcome). The rule says that every outcome we experience in life (good or bad) is the result of how we responded to the previous events in our lives.

We can see that in the same situations people react differently. Some are successful, some are not. We can see that, by responding in a different way, we can get different results. That is why blaming events for our failures are pointless. We must change our responses to the events and then we can get the results we want. We don’t have control over a lot of the events in our lives, but we have control over our responses. We can change our thinking, our behavior, and our communication. We can also change our old habits into the new, better ones.

Jack Canfield states that “Everything you experience in life – both internally and externally – is the result of how you have responded to a previous event”. Everything I experience today is the result of the choices I have made in the past. I have control over three things in my life: my thoughts, my visualizations and my actions. So to change my life I need to change my thoughts, my visualizations and my actions to positive ones. If I keep my negative responses from the past I will keep getting the same negative results, so now is the time to stop complaining and blaming others for my bad results and take full responsibility for my life.

This principle is the prerequisite to a successful life. It is the basic principle. I personally started with this principle because without this principle I wouldn’t be able to implement the other principles.


The above post is a part of longer pdf report "How to Get What You Want". To get the whole report, plus an e-book about Manifestation, sign up to this blog or go to Manifest Wealth Mentor

The next principle "Believe it’s Possible" is coming soon.