The Power of Personal Accountability

It was a while ago when I made a plan to meet an old friend. He worked at a private firm. His phone call came, saying, "Brother, the meeting will have to be somewhere else, I cannot meet at my home." I was deeply surprised as to what the problem could be with meeting at his house.

When he had been sitting in the corner of a hotel for two hours, he finally revealed, "My friend, I could not pay the house rent this time, so the landlord threw my belongings out on the street." I asked him, "Your salary is quite good, so how did things come to this state?" He took a long, deep breath and said, "My luck is just terrible. The government has increased inflation so much that a common man simply cannot survive." Hearing this, I became silent.

Respected readers! This is exactly the story that remains on the tongue of every second person in my country. Someone else is always responsible for our miserable condition. It is either the government, fate, circumstances, inflation, America, or global conspiracies, but it is never we ourselves! Why do we never hold ourselves accountable in this regard?

You must have observed the conversations of people standing at a bus stop: "Brother, I am tired of paying bribes constantly, today I do not even feel like going to work." Another will say, "Oh brother, this is written in our destiny. We will die poor." A third person will chime in from the middle, "The entire trouble is because of the government. This elite class does not let us become rich."

Hearing all this and talk of this nature reminds me of a certain gentleman. This individual lives with his parents even at the age of 40. He sleeps until 10 o'clock in the morning. In the evening, he wastes time over tea with his friends. At night, he curses and hurls criticism at the government. There is always a phone in his pocket, which was purchased on monthly installments. He possesses a car for which he has to ask his father for money just to fill the petrol, yet he always blames the government for his failure.

The question is, is the government really responsible for all our failures? Has destiny really treated us so badly? Or is the reality that we ourselves are responsible for our own failures?

I will give another example. Two brothers used to live in my neighborhood. One started a small business; he would wake up at four o'clock in the morning and work hard until six o'clock in the evening. The second brother would wake up at 10 o'clock in the morning, shirk away from work, and criticize the government in the evening. Today, the first brother has built his own house and bought a car, while the second one still curses his fate. Were the circumstances of both not identical? Were both not born in the very same house? Did both not receive the same education? Then where lies the difference? The difference is only in one place: in the mind!

Our biggest disease is our false ego. We consider small tasks to be beneath us. We feel that we are only made for grand work. We do not tolerate making tea in an office, yet we dream of sitting in the manager's chair. We consider opening a small shop in business to be a humiliation, yet we desire the pomp and glory of a corporate office.

The second curse is laziness. We sleep late into the morning. We shirk away from labor and exploration. We run away from hard work, yet we dream of becoming wealthy. The biggest tragedy of our life is that we want minimum effort and maximum results. This is the poison that is consuming our generations. We do not urge our children to work hard; instead, we teach them the same thing: that they are not responsible for their failure, but this system is. We teach them to complain, not to find solutions.

Have you ever noticed that the nations that progressed never wept over their miserable plight? Japan and Germany were completely destroyed after the Second World War, but instead of calling their respective destinies bad, they started working hard. Today, they are great economies of the world.

So, respected readers! We have to eliminate the "Mr. Protester" inside us. We must change our thinking. We have to understand that our empty pocket is the result of our barren thinking. Until we make our minds fertile, our lands will remain barren.

So come, let us make a pledge today that we will bury our false ego. We will burn away our laziness. And we will irrigate our minds with knowledge and hard work.

Remember! An empty pocket is a problem only as long as your mind is empty.