You are responsible for the course of your own life. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:
In 1987, Levon Helm, a former cotton farmer from Arkansas, sat brooding in his yard, trying to describe why his apparent success had turned to near-bankruptcy:
“Well, it’s hard to put your finger on. You get behind financially and once you get behind financially, you seem to get behind spiritually. And your luck turns against you.”
Levon’s perception of his situation is a common one. He had become quite successful, but had never learned to understand more about economics than, “If you got it, spend it.” As a result, throughout his life, he repeatedly found himself in monetary difficulties. He habitually lived in the moment and didn’t invest much time analysing what his actions would need to be to assure a sound economic future. Unfortunately, his approach to his future is, to a great extent, the approach of the vast majority of people.
Let’s take his comments one sentence at a time:
“Well, it’s hard to put your finger on.”
In this comment, Levon begins by stating that he doesn’t really understand what’s happened to him. As someone who hasn’t given much thought into the subject of economic study, his personal outcome is a mystery to him—impossible to fathom.
“You get behind financially and once you get behind financially, you seem to get behind spiritually.”
He then relates a basic truth—that a by-product of financial decline is a spiritual decline. Morals are often compromised in order to survive the financial debacle and, frequently, a sense of emptiness and failure takes over.
“Your luck turns against you.”
In this last statement, he disavows any personal responsibility for either his monetary problems or any human action that he might have taken that could have corrected the situation, since the elusive and incomprehensible “bad luck” has taken control—a force that he believed he could not have overcome.
And so, Levon led a life of repeated success and loss, never learning that, from the outset, the course of his economic life was of his own making. Had he chosen to understand and anticipate economic events and adjust for them, he could have taken charge of his financial life. Instead, he became a casualty of those events.
Unfortunately, his entire problem could be defined as a lack of human action.
