Teddy Roosevelt said: if you could kick the person in the pants that is responsible for most of your trouble, you couldn’t sit down for a month.

Do I need to add anything else here? Probably not but I will. Ha

If I look at most of the issues of my life that caused stress, anger, anxiety, fear, financial loss and other negative emotions, I have to say that the one that caused the problem was yours truly. Me.

I remember in the mid 90’s, I bought some stock in a hotel company because I just knew I was going to triple my money. The company had been trading for $28 dollars a share and dropped to $5 dollars. I knew the breakup value of the company was at least $16 dollars a share, so I just bought some of that great stock at $5 dollars. Well about 2 months later the stock dropped to about .75 cents a share. Today I keep those stock certificates in a special file that doesn’t have a name on it. If it did have a name on it, the title would be “Doofus.”

I could go on all day with similar examples of issues in my life that are totally because of me. It is my guess that if you were honest, you might be able to name a few as well in your own life.

So I guess the real question is what you do after you have caused some issue in your life. Well take my stock investment story for example, the money was gone, no way to get it back and I could get mad and cast blame but the problem is, the blame was on me. Ha. So the next best thing to do is commit to not making the same mistake again. Fortunately this mistake was only about money and not about something life changing like causing a car accident that injured my family. Sometimes we can learn a great lesson from failure without that failure being life changing.

Rocky Balboa said “it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

Since I have all five of the Rocky movies on CD, I think I am going to go home right now and watch one. KT