Want to take control of your life and reach your ultimate potential? Good, because I have the rules that make that possible:

Rule 1. Everything that has gone right in my life was inevitable based on my personality, behaviour and attitude.

Rule 2. Every terrible thing that has happened to other people was as a result of their bad choices and carelessness.

Rule 3. Everything that has gone wrong in my life was a mix of bad luck and malicious behavior by others.

How do I know this? Because it is the only thing that makes sense! It means that success is going to happen, terrible things won’t and when things occasionally go wrong I don’t have to beat myself up about it because it wasn’t my fault.

These are psychological truths that allow me to function. They allow me to believe in a predictable world and if I can predict the outcomes of behaviours I can control my life.

Humans love control and hate uncertainty. Uncertainty is stressful. These three rules remove that uncertainty. Rule number two might seem to be about other people but it’s really about me. It tells me that all the bad things that happen to other people can be understood in a way that means they won’t happen to me.

Victim blaming is often thought of as callousness when really it’s really a form of psychological self preservation.

The psychology of victim blaming – The Atlantic

What happens when reality clashes up against these rules though?

Many very successful people will tend to emphasise rules one and two and not so much three. They will own their failures as there is little psychological cost to doing so. The failures were learnings on the path to success.

Some will believe those who are less successful deserve every stroke of bad luck that befalls them. “people make their own luck”, they will explain as they abandon all attempts at empathy.

Others will focus on rule number three and the unfairness of the world because the psychological cost of owning their failures would be completely debilitating and destructive.

We think what we think to survive psychologically. Most people believe that life is a mix of luck and effort but still tend towards seeing their own success as earned and extreme bad luck of others as carelessness.

Successful or unsuccessful we filter the way the world works based on outcomes and psychological necessity.

What if you take the psychology out of it. What is the evidence? It’s not as hard as you might think to find the reality. Although there are always exceptions, successful outcomes whether financial, educational or health based are about where you start in life. What was your parents income and education level. Where were you born. Who do you know.

There are always exceptions though, and if you are starting from nowhere the evidence of probability is not a great motivator. The belief that everything is in your own hands is much more useful to keep you going through the struggles that lie ahead. A belief in exceptionalism is required if you are going to be the exception.

Machiavelli in his work The Prince, saw men’s fate as controlled half by fortune and half by their own will. Bad fortune must be resisted, good fortune built upon!

Psychological truth is always more useful at a personal level than economic truth. Cynicism will become a block to trying. This is just as true for the person trying to fight social injustice as it is for the person seeking personal success.

If you are trying to achieve great things, it makes sense to believe that you can ride fortune both good and bad. Surviving through bad fortune, thriving through good. Just try not to become a victim blaming asshole when you do make it.