Pass the buck or take responsibility?

The story goes that a young man got picked up by the city cops for some petty crime. As they interrogated him, they figured he was a college dropout, had struggled to find a job and  generally led a wasted life. He spoke reasonably well, and didn’t come across as a typical hardened criminal. When they asked him why he had let his life go astray, here’s what he had to say. “I grew up in a home where we never had enough money. My father was a drunkard, and he was always beating me and my brother up. We didn’t have money to even buy textbooks. And no place in the house to study.” And then he continued, “So what else do you expect would become of my life? It’s all because of my father. It’s all because of the circumstances in which I grew up!”

Not too far from where that man was picked up by the police, a small function was being arranged to felicitate a young man from the nearby slum who had just topped the entrance exam and secured admission into a prestigious B-School. They asked the boy how he did it, and this is what he had to say: “I grew up in a home where we never had enough money. My father was a drunkard, and he was always beating me and my brother up. We didn’t have money to even buy textbooks. And no place in the house to study.” And then he continued, “It was clear to me that if I had to break out of this rut, I had to work harder, take charge of my life and make my own destiny. And that’s what I did!”

So as you might have guessed, the two men were brothers and yet their lives took very different turns. And the reason is simple. One man chose to blame other people and circumstances for what happened to him. The other man chose to take responsibility for his own life.