Look around, pay attention and you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
I happened to notice it the other night while we were having a family night catching up on a couple reality shows. I made a note that I should write something about it.
Victimhood.
You don’t fall into that trap, do you? You don’t trip over the wires of opting to blame everyone else for failure. You don’t catch on the snare of looking for external factors every time something goes wrong.
We were watching that show—you know the one—where pairs of contestants race around the world and do challenges. One of the teams was lagging, severely, and it was never about them. They played the perpetual victim. Other teams were picking on them. The challenges were so hard. The world was against them. Oh, I’m sure it felt good to dump their successive losses at the feet of everything and everyone else, but wow: it’s a game, it’s supposed to be competitive and challenging and stacked against you at every turn.
Maybe, sure, it was played up by the editors of the show, but I also recognize that as a personality type. I also know that there are a lot of people with big ideas and ambitious dreams who hit a few little obstacles—and oh, will there be obstacles on the path to creative endeavours—and out come the excuses and blaming everything and everyone else.
The list is endless, but you’d recognize it the second you heard it: someone or something is preventing those people from the win, so they give up trying.
But the game is always stacked. The world is always working against most of us. That’s just the universe.