Truly great leaders (level 5) share a number of mostly-common traits. One of them is crediting others (looking out the window) for success and taking responsibility (looking in the mirror) for failures. External factors contributing to success could include luck, excellent team members, & market trends.

Failure often stems from lack of a coherent game plan, inviting the wrong team members onto the bus, & not facing brutal truths. Tactic or trap, writing from the self-center person can be an intentional grammatical style book decision.

The only downside to this technique is the propensity to write in a passive voice and come off as factual where the information is actually pure opinion. Your average reader would not be able to pick up on the fact what you have written (in this post most especially) is not to be taken as gospel, because you have successfully sold opinion as fact - to the average reader.

The critical thinker however, will notice that you have only referenced one other person, but not as a resource. You are not quoting studies or linking to references - which points to the idea you have not come to these conclusions via externalized research.

This technique, in essence, is a different form of propaganda, stemming from the magic words of marketing.

Whether you consider this to be a bad or good thing all depends on what you wish to do with this blog. Far be it for me to say the way you write is wrong - perhaps a bit deceptive, but given your demographic I’m sure they can understand your intentions and come to the same conclusions I did. =)

Notes: I originally referenced the 13 magic words of marketing in a People Watching blog post (send a request to mayobrains at gmail dot com if you do not have access and I'll consider emailing the text to you), and of course propaganda has been on my mind thanks to Maki at DoshDosh.

However, that is not my only concern with the concepts presented in the Aim Clear post. Honestly, the idea of externalizing credit while internalizing fault sounds like so much communism to me - great in theory, but not very effective in practice for a long period of time.

While it's great for improving your image with others temporarily, eventually this will shatter your internal image... and when the inside has grown dull, the outside can no longer shine genuinely. This concept is presented in my Uniform Social Standards theory.

So what is the best solution? Honesty. True, open, honesty. If you think something to be so, then say you think it. If you think you know something to be so, then reference your sources. And when it comes down to who gets the credit - dig down to the root, and find the most true reason for success and failure.

If you abstain from sex, you will never have a child.

If you abstain from knowledge, you will never have a clue.

Having a clue changes a person forever, and it's not easy being the parent of a clue.

Clues have to grow up too, and at some point they become an idea. And when that idea is all grown up, you have to let it out into the world. It's painful letting the idea go out into the big wide world, and some ideas need more help than others from their parents. Eventually though, that idea will enrich society, especially if you prepared it properly for the world when it was a clue.

You are your own worst enemy - because after all, who do you spend the most time with? The only time you will be tortured by an enemy is when you are with that enemy - and you are with yourself your entire life. It makes sense that you should know yourself best of all - but the subjective is always so much more allusive than the objective. It's harder for you to see a whole room in one glance when you're standing in the middle of it, but if you're on the outside looking in through the window, you'll see three of the four walls all in one shot.

There are two ways to avoid failure and making mistakes, and both of them begin with recognizing your weaknesses. Once you have recognized your weaknesses, once you know thyself, you can then begin to either 1. work to make that trait meet a certain standard  or 2. realize there's nothing you can really do about it, but remember that weakness and compensate for it through your other actions.

Don't just sit there and bitch about someone else's standards being too high - do something about it. If you don't care to meet their standards, there's no fault in that, go ahead and get yourself out of the situation where you have to meet their standards. If you do want to meet their standards, don't demand that they lower them - work to improve yourself so that you can meet them as they stand. There will be some cases where you are forced to meet certain standards, and depending on whether you work to meet them or don't, those standards will determine how successful you can be in life, unless you find a work-around.

When you know yourself, most especially your weaknesses, you can spend less time fixing your mistakes and failures, and more time working toward your success. If you take personal responsibility for your weaknesses, and take personal responsibility for improving upon them - then you only have yourself to blame for your success, and nobody can take that away from you, because you gave it to yourself.

Ever see a really successful person and think, "oh they are so lucky"? Give you a little secret, luck is not by chance - it's one-half opportunity and one-half ability to find, see, and utilize that opportunity. The second half is all on you, and wholly depends on your willingness to improve yourself to meet someone else's standards. If you do not know your weaknesses, and cannot improve or work around them to meet their standards, then you will have a much harder time taking advantage of opportunity and making the best of it.

In order for your life to improve, YOU have to improve. If you always play it safe, and never put yourself into situations bigger than yourself, then your life will not improve. Nobody is perfect, but everyone can be better.