When a long-term financial plan does not work out for you, it is not the market’s fault. It is not your advisor’s fault. It is not bad timing, bad luck, or bad headlines.

It is yours.

That statement makes people uncomfortable. And that discomfort is exactly why it matters.

Markets do what markets do. They rise, they fall, they disappoint, they recover. None of this is personal. Any plan that assumes otherwise was never a plan, just a hopeful projection.

Yet when outcomes disappoint, responsibility is often outsourced. The advisor becomes the villain. The strategy was “wrong”, The market was “unfair”, The system was “rigged” and so on.

The truth is simpler and harder to accept: You are the only one who lives with the consequences of your financial behaviour. No one else.

Responsibility Is Not Transferable

You can delegate tasks. You can outsource analysis. You can hire expertise. But you cannot outsource responsibility.

Your advisor does not wake up inside your financial future. They do not retire on your income. They do not feel your anxiety during drawdowns or your regret when poor decisions compound over time. You do.

Advice can guide. Structure and processes can support better decision making to protect you. But agency always remains with you.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a fact of reality.

Like gravity, personal responsibility does not require your agreement. You can deny it, resist it, argue with it—but it remains in force. Ignore it, and the consequences will follow you, dutifully.

The Role of Guidance (and Its Limits)

Good advisors are not magicians. They are architects, guides and coaches.

They help design structures that make good behaviour easier and destructive behaviour harder. They explain what investing actually feels like. They prepare you for discomfort before it arrives, rather than apologising after the damage is done.

But guidance only works if it is insourced by someone who is coachable. Being coachable means:

• Listening when the advice is inconvenient
• Staying when emotions demand escape
• Executing when confidence is low
• Trusting process over prediction

Most long-term failures are not caused by bad plans. They are caused by good plans abandoned at precisely the wrong moment.

Better Outcomes Require Agency

Agency means accepting that your future is shaped less by what markets deliver and more by how you respond. This awareness changes everything.

It means recognising that behaviour matters more than brilliance. Bruce Lee is widely attributed with the quote: “Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity”. 

It also means letting go of the comforting illusion that someone else is ultimately in charge. That illusion feels safe, but it is expensive. Because when responsibility is outsourced, learning stops. Growth stops and the same mistakes repeat.

There Is Nowhere to Hide

Long-term financial outcomes are brutally honest. They reflect what you did—your decisions, habits, reactions, and follow-through—compounded over years and decades. Not your intentions. Not your explanations. Not the stories you tell yourself.

What does matter is agency.

Agency is the recognition that you are not powerless—that you can influence your thinking and behaviour and must take responsibility for the outcomes they produce. It is the deliberate choice to shape your path rather than drift into a future explained away as “fate.”

This is not about blame. It is about empowerment.

The moment you accept full responsibility is the moment you regain control—not over markets, but over yourself. And that is the only control that ever mattered.

Agency is not optional. It is already in effect. You cannot escape its consequences.

The only choice is whether you acknowledge it early—or learn it later, through regret.

 

Written by Marius Kilian