Adopt extreme ownership and treat every outcome as your responsibility

When something goes wrong, the easiest path is blame. The supplier was slow. The client changed scope. Traffic was bad. These statements might be factually correct, but they are strategically useless. They remove your agency and teach your brain to wait for luck. High performers flip the frame: if it touches my world, it’s my responsibility.

This isn’t about guilt, it’s about control. If a meeting fell apart because the prospect didn’t show, you ask, What did I fail to ensure? Double confirmation? A backup channel? A compelling agenda sent in advance? If your workout streak died because the gym was closed, you ask, Why didn’t I keep a home plan ready? Agency breeds creativity. As you collect these questions, you start designing against failure: alternate suppliers, pre‑meeting nudges, backup power, earlier departure times.

There’s a micro‑anecdote that sticks with me. A team missed a big deadline when a key file corrupted. The lead could have complained about software. Instead, she instituted nightly offsite backups and a rule that major drafts lived in two places. In the next crunch, a laptop died on a train, and work continued from the cloud. The office smelled like burnt coffee that day, but nobody panicked.

Psychologically, this is an internal locus of control. People with it believe they influence outcomes, which correlates with greater effort and persistence. Learned helplessness—believing nothing you do matters—kills initiative. Adopting responsibility language (“I didn’t ensure…”) reshapes identity and primes problem solving. Over time, safeguards become systems, and systems make luck less relevant.

Take one recent miss and rewrite it beginning with “This happened because of me,” then identify three levers you could have controlled and design a simple safeguard for each, assigning an owner and a date. Start using responsibility language—swap “they didn’t” for “I didn’t ensure”—and listen to how it changes your options. Set a reminder for a five‑minute Friday review to capture one safeguard you’ll add next week. Begin with the last miss that still bugs you and close the loop today.