Entry № 25 · Plate xxv
On OwnershipGive up the excuses. Own the result, all of it.
An excuse is a small comfort with a very high rent.
The explanation
Every excuse is a transaction: you trade a piece of your power for a piece of relief. The relief is real and short. The loss of power is real and permanent. People who actually move things in their lives do something almost embarrassing: they take responsibility for outcomes that were only partly their fault, because that is the only stance from which anything can be changed.
The story
I was leading a project that was, by any honest measure, failing. Deadlines had slipped, two key engineers had left, and the partner team had gone dark on us. I spent nearly two weeks in my one-on-ones with my boss, Ravi, methodically explaining whose fault each piece was — the reorg, the hiring freeze, the vague brief, the partner team's priorities.
Ravi listened. He didn't interrupt. At the end of the second week he asked me one question, calmly: 'And what are you going to do about it?' I opened my mouth to answer and found I had nothing. Every sentence I had prepared began with 'well, they —' and none of those sentences pointed at anything I could actually move. I went home embarrassed.
That weekend I rewrote the plan from scratch as if every single problem were mine — the hiring, the brief, the partner team, the reorg, all of it. Within a week I had made three uncomfortable calls I had been avoiding. Within a month the project had turned. None of the original 'causes' had disappeared. The reorg was still real. The brief was still vague.
The only thing that had changed was that I had stopped letting those things be the reason. That single question of Ravi's has, quietly, run my career ever since.
