Accountability and Responsibility

Is there someone in your life, or someone who was in your life, that you’re ashamed to deal with? Did you hurt them or fail them in some way that prevents you from having the relationship you’d want or previously had?

I’ve been there, and I’m currently going through a similar situation due to the failure of my retail stores — many of my previous customers became good friends, and there has definitely been a huge wall. My recent travels throughout the world have prevented me from focusing on rebuilding the relationships, and it is never an easy step going to someone and truly apologizing for the pain you may have caused.

Yet the shame and guilt can go both ways. Hurting someone is usually the beginning of a breach, but getting their forgiveness is not enough to fix the situation. If you still feel ashamed or they still harbor resentment, the relationship has little hope for success.

For me, I am quick to forgive and forget. But I know that forgiving is not easy for most people — they seem to always harbor a little fear that they’ll get hurt again. I believe this is definitely a problem for relationships in that they don’t have the ability to grow and flourish back to their previous levels (or higher).

If you truly want to forgive someone, no amount of words will do it. The best way, I’ve found, to rebuild a relationship is to make time to spend more time with the person who hurt you or the person you hurt. Only through face time can we truly show the other party (or be shown ourselves) that the situation is over and that the shame is no longer needed. I’ve hurt friends in the past and they’ve seemed forgiving on the surface, but they’re no longer in my life. I did a bad job of making sure I proved to them that I was responsible and honorable. On the same note, I’ve forgiven people who have been afraid of spending time with me because they likely felt that I didn’t really forgive them — this is again my fault because I did not take steps to spend time with them to rebuild the relationship.

If you’re harboring some guilt or shame or resentment because of a past wrong, the only way you’ll be able to work past it is with time: personal time, face time, relationship building time. It is then that both parties can truly heal and build on a new foundation. Life is very short, don’t let past hurts continue to affect your future.

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Over time I’ve been criticized for being anti-elderly: I’ve always seen the reasons why older employees tend to be replaced with younger employees.

The average worker will complain about how employers don’t want to pay the older employees their value because someone younger can come in and do the same work for less. My life has been dedicated to making sure that my employers (my customers) make money on every dollar they pay me. If I charge $1 for work performed, my customer better make at least $1.01 on my work — or save $1.01 in added efficiency. If they don’t, I am worthless.

The older employee is a real difficult situation to address. Before I can look at the older employee, I have to dispel the myths of today’s market economy. I believe the only reason someone should get a raise is if they increase their value to their customer — the person they are directly trading with. In today’s market, though, we demand raises in order to keep up with the costs of living. I firmly believe that the reason the costs of living get higher is because our government has quietly devalued our dollar. Over time, our dollar has lost 95% of its value because of this sneaky devaluation.

As I age, I realize that my knowledge of the past is worth less and less — if not zero. In my IT consulting business, my knowledge of DOS is mostly useless. My knowledge of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 and DesqView and Ami Pro is completely useless. Why should my current customer pay me more because I knew these things? In some situations, my old knowledge is counter-productive as I still want to do things the old way.

The same is true for the older employee — their knowledge of today’s tasks might be based on their experiences of the past, experiences that may make them less efficient. The younger employees might be more efficient because they learned the latest processes without the burder of unlearning the old ones.

For me, this was a HUGE learning experience — the fact that over time I will be worth less, unless I constantly relearn how to make myself more efficient than the rest. I can charge a high billable rate because I am constantly looking for new ways to get more work done in less time. If Contractor X can do a given job in 5 hours and bills $100 per hour, a man who can do the same work in 2 hours should bill well over $250 an hour — the added time saved (3 hours) is worth well more than $300 because it opens up the customer to doing more work themselves.

Over time, though, I will lose my edge. I will lose my ability to adapt, to become more efficient, and the body and the mind slip as we gain years. It is very important to realize this yourself — no matter your job.

The best years of our lives are our youth, the time we waste trying to learn the same topics of everyone else so that we can get graded just like everyone else. I think this is a fraud committed on the common person — the idea that you should learn as much as you can from the ages of 6-21 so that you can be equal to everyone else. From 21 to 35 we seem to try to find a job that is stable so that we’re secure until we’re 65. This continues the fraud against the average worker.

For me, the best time to secure your retirement is from 16 to 35. Your body, your mind and your life allow you to save rather than spend, and allows you to use the most efficient years of your life in the right way. Yet this isn’t the way we’ve been taught to live. Instead of planning for the less efficient years ahead (35-45 is worse than 16-35, and 45-65 is even worse), we’re supposed to set up our lives to think we’ll earn more and more money — even though it is declining more and more in value as we age.

In order to live the most responsible life, we need to realize our value to society and to other individuals. By taking advantage of our bodies and minds early on, we can prepare for the days when we know we can’t compete with the next generation — so we can accept a paycut and still be stable in our finances.

I feel sorry for the previous generation — promises were made, and now those promises are being harder and harder to back up. Isn’t it better to understand from childhood that the best years of our lives can only be judged with what those best years allow us to do? The best work years are 16-35. The best family years are 25-40. The best relaxing years are 40-55. The best years to pass on all our life’s knowledge to our grandkids are 50-grave.

Don’t believe the myths and the frauds — look at the realities within your own life and adapt today rather than waiting for the next generation to try to fix what you never planned for.

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