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When things go wrong with your online business who do you blame? Do you blame your traffic? Do you blame the link lists or TGPs you submitted your sites to? Do you look for someone else to blame but never consider yourself?

If you've used the work of others do you blame them instead of yourself? Was the text too weak or maybe not really what you wanted? Were the images that the content provider supplied ones that every man and their dog had seen hundreds of times before? Were the graphics inappropriate or not hard-hitting enough?

Sadly, no matter what business a person might be in when a project fails or their whole business fails they rarely blame themselves. Instead they blame everyone else because it's far easier to say that it's everyone else's fault that the project or the business failed than it is to admit that they are the ones to blame.

To be fair there are rare occasions when the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of someone else but more often than not the blame for something failing rests only with the person in charge of the project or in charge of the business.

Of course people don't like to admit that they failed because they made bad decisions or that they failed because they weren't paying attention. To admit to failure is something that just doesn't fit well with most people's egos and so they look to blame others instead.

Even when the failure involves something as variable as search engines people don't want to accept the blame themselves. As one noted search engine researcher likes to point out when someone's site disappears from the front page of their favorite search engine results page they rarely accept that it could be them at fault.

Instead they take refuge in the excuse that the search engines have banned them or that someone else did something under-handed to take away their top spots. Few people stop to consider that perhaps they simply took their eye off the ball and the search engines moved on and left them behind. Nor do they want to consider that perhaps someone has been able to do a better job of search engine optimization than they have.

And people do the same no matter what the project might have been. Let's face it, in this business you are the captain of your own fate. In almost every situation you succeed or fail based entirely on your own efforts and blaming others does nothing to help you achieve your goals.

Content providers, whether they're graphic artists, photographers or writers, provide you with the content you ask for. They put their best efforts into providing you with the work you want and if it doesn't meet the standards you have set for your project then you need to say so right at the start.

If your project fails you can't then go back and point the finger at those who have done work for you or supplied you with content because you accepted it in the first place. Instead take an honest look at the factors that may have led to the failure. Look at the steps you took along the way and see where you may have stuffed up and look at ways you can prevent those mistakes from occurring in future.

When you stop and look at the root causes you will have a good chance of not making those same mistakes in the future. While you go on blaming others for your mistakes you will have no chance of succeeding either now or further down the track.

It's those people who accept the blame themselves and don't rush to blame everyone else that will ultimately succeed. Those who want to go on crying and blaming others are the ones who never learn from their mistakes and will never succeed.

It's a tough lesson to learn and one that society really doesn't prepare us for. Instead of teaching us that the buck stops with you society teaches you that the smart thing to do is pass the buck. Today we're beginning to see some important people accept that the buck does indeed stop with them but they refuse to accept that there is a lesson to be learned from their failure.

Don't you make the same mistake; when you do get round to accepting that the blame for your failure rests not with others but with you then also learn from the lessons that failure is trying to teach you. When you do that you won't make those mistakes again and you will succeed.

Of course, you can be even further ahead of your competitors if you never play the blame game and learn to accept responsibility for failure. Leave that game to others and move straight into the big league where the players know how to win without crying foul all the time.