"Eddie Did It"

It's been said, and well repeated, that the weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory. For this reason people keep journals, genealogical records and baby books.

In my mother’s recording of my brother's first words, his very first sentence was “Eddie did it.” I was his older brother by two years. With this utterance of “Eddie did it”, he was simply proving that he had entered the “Adam and Eve blame game," the age-old drama of finding creative ways to avoid responsibility and shift the blame to someone else. We do not like the negative consequences for poor choices we make, so we try to throw them onto others. Let others take he rap. At a very early age my brother Ron began practicing the part.

It is a profound insight when we finally learn that we are responsible for the things we say and do. Especially in the post-Freud era in which pop culture assumes that my parents or my circumstances made me the way I am, that I have no choice but to be this way, to behave badly or whatever.

Politicians are especially good at this. When an initiative fails, it was not their fault. "I inherited an impossible situation." This is why people have lost respect for their elected officials.

In many work environments, the blame game can make it almost impossible to learn from previous mistakes because rather than get to a good diagnosis of what happened all the players have been more concerned about covering their tracks. In a recent book I was reading, the author noted that when we have autopsies without blame, only then will we discover what killed the patient.

Mistakes are inevitable in life, and in business. Some decisions in business are simply educated guesses. New product introductions do not always find welcoming arms to greet them. The Polaroid Camera had a very long runway before it got off the ground, for example. It took a lot of faith and persistence to stick with that one. Many other products, however, were doomed before they left the lab. Does this mean we should simply stop trying? No, each failure is a learning opportunity.

I'm grateful to work in an environment where my past blunders are not posted on billboards around the office. No one ever pulled a gun and threatened to walk me to a shallow grave in the back forty for an ad campaign that bombed.

Maybe it's easier in a workplace where there is corporate growth. We're a team without a backup squad with plenty to do, so we need each other. I can imagine that in some companies this is not the case. It has to be tough working in a setting where you know there are people sharpening axes in the back room.

In the meantime, if you make it a habit to assume responsibility for your words and actions, you will be trusted by others and get more opportunities in life. Editors, for example, enjoy working with writers who meet deadlines. They schedule space in their mags and do not like the idea of scrambling at the last minute to fill a slot. You will start to lose cred when you resurrect the old "dog ate my manuscript" excuse, or any other excuses.

Excuses, excuses. If you need one, and your don't have a really good one up your sleeve, put this one in your back pocket, just in case. Remember, you can only use it once. "Eddie did it."