There’s a line in an essay Joan Didion wrote for Vogue in 1961 that I keep coming back to. She wrote it as the magazine went to press, filling a hole left by a writer who never filed. An unglamorous origin for something that has outlived most of the advice published since. Character, she said, is the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life. Self-respect grows out of that.

Read it quickly and it sounds like a fridge magnet. Read it slowly and it starts to feel like an accusation.

Because most of us keep a running list of reasons our lives look the way they do. The boss. The ex. The economy. The city. I’ve used all four.

The self-esteem detour

For about thirty years, the popular answer to feeling bad about yourself was to feel better about yourself. Schools ran assemblies on it.

Then, in 2003, four psychologists led by Roy Baumeister went through the actual evidence and published a long review of it in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Their conclusion, in plain English: high self-esteem doesn’t cause good results. There’s a mild link with doing well at school, but the arrow mostly points the other way. Doing well makes you feel good about yourself. Feeling good about yourself does very little to make you do well. Praise on its own can simply produce a person who is pleased with himself.

Which would explain why the affirmations never did much for me. They were receipts for a purchase I had not made.

Owning it without kicking yourself

Here’s where people flinch. If I accept responsibility for my life, does that mean admitting I’ve wasted a fair chunk of it?

Sort of. But the flinch assumes that taking responsibility and punishing yourself are the same move. They come apart more easily than that.

Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at Berkeley ran four experiments on this. People who spent a few minutes being kind to themselves about a personal failing came away more motivated to fix it than people who spent those minutes topping up their self-esteem. They studied longer after flunking a test. They were keener to make amends after behaving badly. It’s one paper, so hold it loosely, but the direction is useful: being gentle with yourself makes it safer to be honest about the facts.

Shame does the opposite. Shame makes you look away, and you cannot take responsibility for something you’re refusing to look at.

I blamed London for two years

I lived in London and decided the city was the problem. Grey, expensive, everybody busy. I built a whole personality out of the complaint.

Then I moved, and found I had packed the problem in my hand luggage. Same habits, same avoidance, better weather.

That’s the bit Didion is pointing at. Circumstances are real: rent, bad managers, bad luck that arrives without knocking. But there’s nearly always a slice of the situation that belongs to you, and locating that slice is the entire exercise. It doesn’t have to be the biggest slice, just yours.

Bangkok, where I live now, offers me a version of it daily, in traffic form.

Small promises, kept

So what do you actually do about it? Nothing impressive, I’m afraid.

Self-respect behaves like credit. You get it by having a record. Every time you say you’ll do something and then do it, you file a piece of evidence about who you are. Every time you don’t, you file that too, and some part of you reads the file back to you at two in the morning.

Start small, because small is what you can actually keep. Take one thing you’ve been promising yourself for a year, shrink it until it’s almost embarrassing, and do it for a fortnight. Ten minutes of the thing. One phone call. Asleep before midnight.

After two weeks you’ll have something you didn’t have before, which is evidence.

The uncomfortable inventory

Try this on a quiet evening. Write down three things in your life you complain about regularly. Next to each one, write the smallest action you could take this month that’s entirely within your control.

The list is short and irritating, because you already know all the actions. Have the conversation. Send the application. Say the number out loud. Stop asking the same friend the same question for the ninth time and hoping for a different answer.

A friend of mine has been leaving his job for years now. He tells me so on a rooftop somewhere, on repeat, every few months. He isn’t lying and he isn’t lazy. He fully intends to leave. What he has never done is one thing that would cause it to happen, and I suspect that is why he never seems to like himself much on those evenings.

Didion reckoned our grandparents understood this better, and the word she used for it was discipline: living by doing the things you don’t particularly want to do. It’s deeply unfashionable. It’s also still true.

You don’t have to accept responsibility for everything. Some of what happened to you was done to you. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. But whatever part is actually yours is worth starting with.