Success Quote by Barbara Sher

Sher’s line lands like a quiet intervention in a culture that swings between two equally comforting fictions: “nothing is my fault” and “everything is my fault.” The power is in the word “distinguish.” It’s not a pep talk about empowerment so much as a demand for better mental bookkeeping. If you can sort what’s truly outside your reach from what you set in motion, you stop wasting energy on guilt you can’t cash in and denial you use to dodge change.

The subtext is practical, almost entrepreneurial. In business, “externalities” are the market, regulation, timing, other people’s decisions. Internal causes are the choices you made, the systems you tolerated, the risks you accepted. Sher is pushing a managerial mindset applied to the self: conduct an honest postmortem. Not to self-flagellate, but to regain leverage. Responsibility becomes a tool, not a moral costume.

Context matters: Sher built a reputation in the self-help and career-coaching world by translating ambition into steps, not vibes. This sentence is a rebuttal to helplessness marketed as humility (“who could’ve predicted?”) and to the brittle meritocracy fantasy that treats misfortune as personal failure. It’s also a warning against the seductive comfort of blaming “circumstances” for patterns you keep repeating.

What makes it work rhetorically is its balanced severity: it grants you innocence where it’s real, then removes your alibi where it isn’t. The result is a colder, cleaner kind of hope: if you caused it, you can redesign it. If you didn’t, you can stop negotiating with the uncontrollable and start planning around it.