[Credit: Per Ola Wiberg]

I’ve experienced many, many failures in these last two years as a freelancer. Even some of the few successes I’ve known seemed to fall just short of where I’d have liked them to land. As I’ve found out, though, these failures weren’t coincidental and they most definitely weren’t predestined.

They were self-fulfilled.

So much of what we do depends on our perspective and our worldview. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.” And if you don’t have complete faith in whatever you are planning to do, there’s a really good chance that you’ll, consciously or not, screw everything up just because you feel like it’s not supposed to work out.

It doesn’t have to be like this, though. It’s easier than you think to get control of your life and to make things work. Here’s how.

The Creatures of Circumstance

Everyone in the world can be separated into one of two categories. The first of these categories contains probably 70% to 80% of the world’s population. These people are “Creatures of Circumstance.” Life happens to them and their choices are decided for them by their inaction. They are prone to complaining and generally maintain a pessimistic outlook on life. These people spend their lives as victims of the “system” (whatever they think the system is) and tend to blame all their problems on fate. They might even feel cursed and they likely experience depression.

In a recent post over at Art of Manliness, Brett and Kate briefly talk about Dr. Martin Seligman’s experiments with dogs. For this experiment, Seligman put together three groups of dogs. The first group received electric shocks that could be stopped if the dogs pressed a panel with their nose. The second group received electric shocks, but they could not be stopped even if they pressed the panel. The third group was a control group that received no shocks.

Next, Seligman and his team put the dogs into a box that was divided into two compartments by a small fence. The fence was short enough that the dogs could see and jump over it if they wanted. When a dog from the first group was put in and a shock was administered, it quickly jumped over the fence to escape it. When a dog from the third group was put in, the same thing happened. But when a dog from the second group was put in, it just sat there and suffered the shock. Because of the first part of experiment, the second group of dogs had learned that resisting the shock was futile. They had learned to be helpless even though they had control over the situation.

People who are creatures of circumstance have learned helplessness. As Brett and Kate explain, those who have learned to be helpless typically have a Me/Always/Everything attitude. For example, when I first started as a freelance web designer and I didn’t get a project I had bid on, my reaction was something like this:

I’m not a good enough web designer and I’m not likable on the phone.  (Me) I’ll never get any better. I’ve already tried and I just feel cursed. (Always) I’ll never be able to travel and work online. I should just quit and accept that I’m not a good entrepreneur. (Everything)

These were completely unreasonable ideas, but they were there and they held me back. This feeling was spread throughout every area of my life and my work really suffered for it.

But obviously not all people who have experienced setbacks suffer from the same mentality I suffered from and just because you currently feel like everything you do is cursed and pointless doesn’t mean you always have to feel that way.

You’re not cursed. There’s another option.

The Creators of Circumstance

There are certain people who are nearly stoic in their life philosophy. Nothing seems to affect them or to set them back. They push forward, stay determined and ultimately succeed. No force in the world determines their destiny, only themselves. These people don’t use the circumstances they are given as a crutch to justify failure. These people are Creators of Circumstance.

Creators of circumstance have an opposite perspective on life from their creature counterparts. Instead of following the Me/Always/Everything model, they follow a Not Me/Not Always/Not Everything philosophy. What they experience is an external, isolated incident. It has no lasting effect on their lives. For example, if I had been a creator of circumstance at the time I started freelancing, my thought process might have looked something like this when I lost a project:

They probably already have a go-to web designer. (Not Me) I’ll eventually find the right kind of company to work for. (Not Always) Until then, at least I’ve got this successful blog that I can continue growing. (Not Everything)

Steps for Becoming a Creator of Circumstance

1. Be Optimistic This was pretty difficult for me in the beginning. Every time I turned around I found myself thinking poorly of the design I do or the coding I do. On more than one occasion I’ve told people I felt cursed to failure. None of this is true. If you want to be successful, you have to believe you can be successful. Be optimistic. If it helps put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you find yourself being negative.

2. Express Negative Truths Positively It’s easy to feel as if being positive is somehow self-delusion. If that’s the case, you’re doing it wrong. You want to express the truth, but express it in a positive away. As an example, instead of saying, “I’m so far from my goal. I don’t think I’ll ever get there” say “I’ve got a lot to do to reach my goal, but I’ve come so far in such a short time that I should be able to reach it within six months.”

3. Study Your Mentors for Motivation Look at the people who have the lifestyle and the list of achievements you would most like to have. Read their biographies or their Wikipedia entries. You’ll likely find several times throughout their lives when something seemingly terrible happens, yet they always manage to push through and do even greater things.

For example, as a designer, a tech aficionado and an entrepreneur, I greatly admire Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had at least one huge setback that probably would have gotten me to give up had I been in his shoes. In the mid-80s, Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he helped found. I can’t imagine how devastating it must be to lose something you helped build from the ground up. But did Jobs quit? Did he disappear into obscurity and live out the rest of his life as a mediocre has-been?

No.

First, he founded another computer company called NeXT which developed the NeXT Computer, the workstation Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the World Wide Web in 1990. Next, Jobs bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and changed it’s name from The Graphics Group to Pixar Animation Studios. In 1995, Pixar released the first full-length computer animated movie, Toy Story, making movie and tech history.

By 1997, Jobs was doing just fine, but Apple was nearly dead. When Apple bought NeXT, Jobs returned as CEO and NeXT’s NeXTSTEP Operating System became the foundation for Mac OS X.

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This just goes to show that if you stay positive and keep working, good things happen. You are completely in control of your life. Your background doesn’t dictate your future and other people can’t dictate your life. Only you can.

So make things happen!

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