“If you could kick the person most responsible for most of your troubles, you wouldn’t be able to sit down.” –Anonymous
Most of us have more problems than we think we deserve, and one of our favorite pastimes is to search for scapegoats upon whom to blame them. There are always so many candidates from which we can choose our scapegoats. Some of us blame our troubles on the government. Others blame our parents for our problems, contending that if they had done a better job of parenting, we would be better able to deal with the problems of life. And, of course, there is always that good old abstract scapegoat called bad luck that we can use if none of the others fit.
In some cases, others are responsible for some of our troubles, but we can’t blame others for all of them. Too often we are to blame when things go wrong. Perhaps we failed to engage in sound planning or to exercise sufficient caution, or maybe we didn’t work hard enough to achieve our goal. We may have simply made serious errors in judgment or been too impatient. Whatever the reason, we need to learn to accept responsibility for our own actions when we are to blame for our problems.
We are all human beings capable of making mistakes, and when we have clearly made a mistake, we should acknowledge that we have done so and try to learn from it. Most people are able to do that, but some absolutely refuse to acknowledge ever having made a mistake or ever having been wrong about anything. These “perfectionists” refuse to accept even the possibility that they are capable of being wrong or making mistakes, and they go out of their way to cultivate their public image of infallibility.
It is difficult to communicate with such people. They seem to have such a strong need to always be right that they will destroy damaging evidence or create supportive evidence to “prove” that they are not at fault. They seem to think that if they admit to being wrong about one thing, they will be opening the door to the possibility that they may be wrong about a lot of other things, and such a possibility is more than they can deal with. It must be extremely difficult for these people to function. Absolutely none of us are perfect, and it must be extremely exhausting to continuously try to convince ourselves and others that we are.
It is, of course, unhealthy for any of us to deny our fallibility. It is all right to defend ourselves when we are certain that we are not at fault. But when we insist that we are never wrong, we lose our credibility with others as well as with ourselves. How can we learn from our mistakes if we always refuse to recognize them?
Think about it.
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Copyright 2026
Allen W. Smith
