© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

If your broker or a friend gives you a hot stock tip and you lose money, whose fault is it? Yours. If the government changes the rules about retirement accounts and you have to pay a penalty, whose responsibility is it? Yours. If you slid for a while and missed out on meaningful market trends, whose fault is it? Yours.

Nobody is as interested in your money as much as you are. You're the one who will save it, spend it, squander it as the case may be. You have total responsibility for it. The fact that the institutions you deal with are immense and sophisticated doesn't diminish your responsibility to yourself, nor does the power of the government. The fact that you started with nothing or that your parents left you nothing doesn't diminish your responsibility. If, despite all your efforts, you don't do well in your investments for a time, it's still your responsibil­ity. You can always weigh evidence, plan, reflect, and learn.

It's a natural human temptation to blame others or outside forces for our setbacks. But you find a fabulous human freedom when you free yourself from the petty temptation to feel sorry for yourself. When you take personal responsibility for your own condition, you orient yourself toward possibility rather than failure. You move forward instead of standing still or slipping backward. You give yourself the stuff to keep going. Without that stuff, without the strength personal responsibility brings you, you don't get very far.

You cannot take intelligent risks without also taking on personal responsibility for the downside of those risks—your own potential failures. But there is one important plus in this equation. Since it's your money you risk, and your money you take responsibility for, you aren't accountable to anyone else. If you fail, you laugh at yourself, dust yourself off, then get back up. What other people might think is totally irrelevant. Besides, as this is your affair and nobody else's business, you've kept it all private anyway. Remember the quiet millionaire as opposed to the flashy one? The only person you need to prove anything to is yourself.