How to Become 5% Bill Gates

Today, we’re going to look at an important ingredient for a better, brighter, and happier life — the right way to think about personal responsibility for your own life. We’re going to help you understand this aspect by mixing both practical information and a solid dose of inspiration.

Let’s start off and discover what does being responsible means exactly and what can it do for your well-being.

Well, many self-help books, courses, and authors will tell you that the first major step toward an extraordinary life is taking full responsibility of your life. Admitting to yourself that you are in charge of your own life and you are entirely responsible for the results you achieve in life. Now, there’s good evidence. So, this kind of advice (to some extent) is quite good. Psychologists have been studying people’s sense of control over their own life for decades now, and they’ve been repeatedly saying that it’s better to have an internal locus of control than an external one. Now, that is to think that your results mostly depend on you. People with a more internal locus of control or point of control tend to be more confident, more motivated, and have more initiative. They’re more persistent in front of challenges, and ultimately, they achieve more success in life. They’re usually also healthier and have a higher level of well-being than other people.

So, there definitely is something to the advice to take full responsibility for your life. The problem is that this advice lacks nuance, and for this reason, while it often creates some good results, it also generates a lot of problems quite frequently. This is why we want to take a closer look at this piece of advice and find some ways to adjust it in order to make it more effective.

We’ll start by pointing out that psychologists have discovered that it’s people with a largely internal locus of control who get the best results, not people with a completely internal locus of control. Now, these folks believe that they are to a large extent in charge of their lives, but not entirely, and this is where the problem with seeing yourself as entirely responsible for your life shows itself. It takes a good idea and pushes it to an extreme. It simply leaves no room for the possibility that some things are not in your control and some things are truly not your responsibility. Like it or not, there are factors beyond our control that do influence our lives. For example, being in the right place at the right time can matter a lot for the amount of success you have, and what that place and time are can often not be predicted accurately.

In fact, many things cannot be predicted accurately.

• The economy
• The stock market
• Wars
• Social changes
• The weather
• Other people's behavior

And so on...

These are out of our control. There is a factor of luck and chaos that is all around us and we simply cannot bypass it altogether.

Bill Gates is often praised for the immense level of business and financial success he’s achieved. Starting his business at a very young age. Now, there’s no doubt that Gates is a very smart, organized, hard-working man, and much of his success strategy can be decoded and copied, but Gates also had a huge amount of luck being among the very first on the market with a product type that was rapidly gaining relevance. And by being among the first, he managed to quickly sees a large portion of the computer operating systems market, which then created a positive cycle that helped his business to grow even more. As business historians claim, many companies eventually came after Microsoft with better-operating systems, but once Microsoft had a near monopoly, while some of these enjoyed notable success, they couldn’t come close to the success of Microsoft.

Now, don’t get us wrong. This isn’t to say that intelligence, skills, hard work, and perseverance don’t matter — they do, and they actually matter a lot, but things out of our control like luck matters too, especially when it comes to extraordinary results. The luck of being first on the market, the luck of being born into the right country, the luck of having a family that can help you to financially start your first business, and so on suggest a certain ideal way of thinking about your locus of control. It’s good to see yourself as largely in control and in charge of your life, while also acknowledging that there are factors that are unpredictable and just beyond your control in life. This means you’re not entirely responsible for any failure or success in life, just responsible to a significant degree. And this kind of mindset does wonders for your broader outlook on life, which in turn influences your emotions, your behavior, and your results.

When you believe you are entirely responsible for your life, if you do something that has great success, you will think it was all your doing. With this mindset, it’s easy to get cocky and lose sight of your shortcomings, which down the road will bring you more failure than success. Also, if you do something and you fail at it, you will think it was entirely your fault and this creates unnecessary guilt and shame about your failure as if these negative emotions aren’t bad enough. They will make you fear your future failure even more because you don’t want to feel that kind of guilt or shame ever again.

But on the other hand, thinking you are largely but not entirely in charge of your life avoids both of these problems. You don’t become too arrogant when you have success, and you can also admit that some of your failures are not fully your fault and not worth feeling bad about. Notice that this isn’t a middle-of-the-road approach. You’re not thinking that you’re half in control, you’re still thinking that you are largely in control while also recognizing there are some things beyond your control. This is a mindset that’s both empowering and realistic at the same time.

Many of us don’t like the idea of lacking control over some things, but unfortunately, it’s just the truth, and admitting that we lack control over some of what is happening to or around us while clashing with our endless need for control, also liberates us to accept some failures and some limitations in what we achieve while acknowledging that we can still achieve great things. Maybe you won’t be the next Bill Gates, but you could achieve 5% of what he did and that would still be a significant achievement that few people will ever match. Once you start thinking about control and personal responsibility this way, there’s only one effective way to put it into practice. Whenever you seek to achieve something, first you identify the factors that are within your control as well as the factors that are not within your control. Then you put your efforts into doing the things that are within your control and learning to accept the things that are not. It’s the best way to achieve the best results and also enjoy them as much as possible.

We trust that this information and the insights you gained today will help you to think about personal responsibility in a healthier and better way and just improve your life with, readers. But this is only going to happen if you consciously practice and apply this kind of thinking.

Remember —

“Knowledge is nothing without consistent implementation.”

So, take these insights and put them to good use.

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