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Radical accountability is one

… and accepting this can make your life much easier and more pleasant.

Much has been written about “radical accountability” — taking 100% responsibility for your actions and situation. CEO coach Jerry Colonna has a useful line:

How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

I personally like fellow coach Matt Mochary’s stronger formulationSee Matt’s underrated “curriculum” for running a company., although I understand why Colonna keeps it at “complicit:”

What did I do to help create this situation?

And frankly, I’d prefer an even stronger one:

What did I do to cause this situation?

The stronger the question, the more it forces you to look for levers you actually control.

Taking complete responsibility for your actions and your current situation — including any perceived “problems” — is a powerful tool. It simply feels better (despite intuitively seeming like perhaps it should not), and it often leads you straight to a path to resolving the issue (“well, have you tried doing the opposite of that?”).

Rather than tilting at windmills and stewing about why those Other People won’t just do The Right Thing, taking responsibility for your problems gives you back your agency to resolve them.

Complaining that “Bob just isn’t doing his job well” (zero personal ownership of the problem) becomes “I haven’t given Bob sufficient feedback and direction on the task” (clear next step: do the opposite and provide him the feedback) or even “I’ve kept Bob in his role long after realizing he isn’t going to do it well” (reposition him or let him go).

But that’s all the more obvious sense in which your problems are (or at least can be seen to be) “your fault.” There’s a second, more subtle way in which it’s true as well:

Your “problem” is only there because you knowingly or unknowingly are insisting on a frame that makes it a problem in the first place.

Your frames are the other

“Problems” do not exist in the abstract. They only exist in the context of a frame — or, I suppose, a Way of Looking (which is really what this is all about — read that article for a different approach to this idea).

By a “frame” I just mean the way you’re choosing to see or look at a situation: the assumptions, standards, values, and definitions you’re bringing to it.

Suggesting that Bob is underperforming inherently assumes a frame of what “proper” performance entails. You can’t “underperform” without a frame of reference for performance.

Even if you don’t accept responsibility for Bob’s output (as I suggest you could, above), you are still responsible for the frame that defines what “good enough” looks like. Those are the two distinct levers: the situation and the lens.

But when presented with this, people often object: “that’s an easy example. It’s not even a Real Problem.” Sometimes with the addendum, “it’s easy for you to opine about this — you don’t have any Real Problems.”No doubt I have a wonderful life for which I am deeply grateful, with fewer things that would conventionally be seen as “problems” than many others have. Of course, my life is not without what many would consider “problems” of my own (and it’s always interesting when people assume this isn’t the case!), but I generally — not always — am able to and choose to view them otherwise. It may be easier for me to reflect like this than it is for others, for which I am also grateful. But none of this violates the core point, regardless of your views of its author and your perception of his life.

To which I say: “okay — what is a Real Problem?”

They usually have one of two answers: 1) someone unemployed, unable to make their monthly rent, or 2) a threat to life or limb, like someone with a knife running at you, or a terminal cancer diagnosis.

And to preempt an objection: I’m not claiming everyone’s situation is equally easy; I’m claiming that in every situation there’s a frame doing the work of turning “what is” into a “problem.”

Two “Real Problems”

Let’s take the first — an impending rent payment one can’t make, upon which they’ll be kicked out of their housing. Maybe — to cut out some “easy” answers — they also don’t have family or friends they can move in with, and no money at all with which to find cheaper accommodations.

To many, this problem feels like an obviously real problem, as if it can’t be a issue of simply “framing.” And in some sense it is: not paying rent has real consequences. But it still only shows up as a problem dependent on a particular frame.

And there is, indeed, a frame implied. At a bare minimum, the frame includes “I need a roof over my head.” If the person didn’t believe that, then there would no problem at all. The problem doesn’t exist absent the frame.

There are people out there without rent or mortgage or an owned home that are perfectly happy with the arrangement. To give one example, Jeffrey Sawyer writes in An inquiry into living:

For the first few days I was walking, I would look for a comfortable place to sleep before the sun went down. This became too much work, however, and I ceased to concern myself with finding a secluded hideaway. Rather, I just walked until I was tired. A place inevitably showed up that suited my needs: a school bus, the back of a truck, a church, a gazebo behind a town hall, under a poncho in someone’s backyard, behind a VFW lodge, a cemetery, an emergency room, the woods, a truck stop, the bushes in front of a college dormitory. Every night a new place, new people, a new environment.

Sawyer has dropped the frame “I must have stable, conventional housing,” and replaced it with “I can sleep wherever I find myself.”

If you want to read a pragmatic perspective from someone who holds some very different frames than most of society, give that essay a read. (You’ll find that his frame still creates “problems” of its own!)

Or, one better, try on Sawyer’s frames of life, even if just for a moment. There’s nothing stopping you! Suddenly a wide range of perceived or possible “problems” — limited rent money, no food in the house, boredom — wash away.

Now: I am not saying that Sawyer’s frames are “right” or “better” — all I am suggesting is that they are options. There’s also nothing wrong with knowingly choosing a frame that gives you a problem! You’re more than welcome to insist that you need a roof over your head. All I’m arguing is that it’s better to do so knowingly than unknowingly.

Most people won’t (and probably shouldn’t) adopt Sawyer’s frames wholesale, for all sorts of reasons. The point here is not “you should be fine being homeless,” it’s that “even here, the sense of ‘problem’ is downstream of a frame.”

If you’re staring down the barrel of being evicted from your apartment, you have three options:

  1. See it as a problem, without being aware of the underlying frame, likely inducing some meaningful mental suffering and anguish
  2. Become aware of the underlying frame, choose to keep it around, and continue to see the eviction as a problem — perhaps keeping the suffering, but at least knowing that you could remove it by changing frames, which sometimes loosens the grip it has on you
  3. Become aware of the underlying frame, and choose to drop it in favor of another. Suddenly, your “eviction problem” isn’t a “problem” — it’s just an “eviction,” empty of meaning or judgement — or maybe it’s still a problem, but a more easily solvable one given the new frame

I’m not trying to rank frames on some universal moral scale here. In practice, some frames will be more useful or ethical for you given your goals and values — but that’s exactly the point: they’re choices, not inevitabilities.

All I want to make the case for is that I find it much more pleasant to be aware of the frames and choose them while being aware of the consequences of such choices.

It’s fine to pick frames that give you a “problem,” if you want to. I don’t frequently find doing so terribly useful. But you can! It just feels silly to do so unknowingly and unnecessarily, causing yourself suffering.

This is what I mean when I say your problems are your fault: they only arise dependent on a frame, and your frames are within your control (sometimes hard to change! But always possible!).

It’s worth asking yourself: what is seeing this “thing” or “experience” or “situation” as a “problem” doing for you? I find the answer is rarely very much. It’s usually just causing me suffering.

“But,” some say, “that doesn’t come close to a terminal illness or an armed attacker! Those are Truly Real Problems. You might die!”

Perhaps predictably, the last bit there is the rub. You’re carrying a frame that your own death is a bad thing.

There are people out there with terminal illnesses who are perfectly happy and have accepted death. It is possible to take a different frame on this very mortal matter.

But… should you? I don’t know! That’s a personal decision. But my view is that if you’re going to suffer, you should at least be choosing to suffer — choosing the frame that creates the problem that causes you to suffer.

None of this means “don’t run from the guy with the knife” or “refuse treatment.” It’s just that you can drop the frame that turns the situation into a source of extra, unnecessary suffering. And when I say suffering, I’m talking about the psychological suffering (again, see Ways of Looking), not the physical pain.

You can take control

You may not control what happens, but you have far more influence over how you frame it — and thus how much you suffer, and how many “problems” you think you have — than it first appears

I don’t mean to make light of any of this. Many of these frames are strongly societally conditioned, and in some cases, even arise from our very biological nature. I’m not cold-heartedly saying “if you’re sick, you should just be okay with it, it’s easy.” It’s often a lifelong journey to accept your power over your own frames (and thus your problems and your level of suffering).

Along the way, it can be frustrating and anger-inducing — you might realize, painfully, just how much unnecessary suffering you’ve put yourself through by use of implicit frames. That can cause some unpleasant reactions.

At the end of the day: choose whatever frames you want.

Maybe you want a frame of high standards at work, which then causes you the problem of Bob’s underperformance. There may be good reasons to do so.

Maybe you want a frame of needing a roof over your head, which then causes you the problem of suffering through your impending payment. There may be good reasons to do so. The same is true for threats to your life.

And it is also worth noting: frames are not binary. You can choose a frame that makes the problem disappear entirely (“I don’t need a roof over my head”), or you can choose a frame that keeps the problem around but makes it easier to resolve (“I do need a roof over my head; but I’m now open to asking extended family, whereas before I was not”).

There is an infinite space of frames — and this is all a call to choose the one that best serves you rather than accepting whichever the roulette wheel dealt you.

Is this too passive?

Some people react negatively to this whole concept with objections like:

“well if you’re just willing to accept every situation, you’ll never get anything done”

“this is way too passive, sometimes problems actually need to be solved”

“this is a weak and low-agency perspective”

“don’t you know that George Bernard Shaw said ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’?”

And to that, I would offer two counterpoints.

A theoretical one: I think this is the higher agency way of looking at the world, not lower. It puts you in control of the suffering you feel, your problems, and how you see the world (which ultimately mediates your reality). Instead of just letting the world program how you feel about things, take that into your own hands and do what you want with it — including trying to “adapt the world to [yourself]” if you so desire.

And an empirical one: the people I know who most strongly live this philosophy are both extremely happy and seem to get a lot of shit done — whatever they happen to care about at the moment. They are not what I would describe as “passive.” So I have at least some anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

The people, on the other hand, who most blindly and uncritically follow the frames that they’ve happened to fall into tend to be the most passive and least agentic. (In my experience, at least!)

So, hey, try it out. See if it works for you. Next time you frustratingly run into a problem that you can’t seem to resolve “your normal way” or with sheer effort, look for the frame that is creating it, and ask yourself how much you care about that frame. Is it enough to suffer over? Maybe it is — but maybe it isn’t.

If you’re going to suffer, let it be for frames you chose on purpose.

Looking for more to read?

Or, more on problems and frames:

My post on Ways of Looking is a different lens on all this, but getting at some of the same underlying points.

In line with that, I have a growing section of Useful Ways of Looking which are effectively frames that you can choose from — many of which can be helpful to lead you towards resolving problems or making them disappear entirely.

And for even more...

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