Epictetus said there are three stages of blame

First, the uninstructed stage: the uninstructed person blames others for his/her misfortunes.

Second, the beginner stage: the beginner blames him or herself.

Third, the instructed stage: the instructed person blames neither others nor him/herself.

Most successful people I work with are stuck in stage two, and they are somewhat proud of it (which I think; it’s okay to be a little bit proud of having made progress… just don’t let it give you an ego!).

They've stopped blaming the market, their teams, or the economy; and that's good!

But now every failure gets blamed immediately, and instead, on their own perceived failures or shortcomings.

Did they miss a target? "I lacked discipline." Did they make a bad hire? "I should have seen it coming." Do they struggle to balance career and family? "I'm a bad mother/father."

They call this accountability and have been treating it as a professional virtue for years. But it's not Virtue in any sense. It's Vice. Epictetus would say such people were in stage two of three; that their instruction well unfinished!

To him (Epictetus), self-accusation is the same error as blaming your colleague, just pointed inward. Both misplace the source of the disturbance, and so both are the same fundamental error in judgement.

In that same chapter he writes that we are disturbed not by things but by our judgments about things. In the career context that might be: the deal not working out actually hurt us. In this example it's our judgment of the failed deal which hurts us; that judgement is the catastrophe, not the failed deal.

Stage three drops blame as a concern altogether. When something goes wrong, the instructed person examines the judgments behind the pain, corrects what they are able to (their choices, their responses), and carries on unperturbed.