There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.

Denis Waitley is best known as a late-20th-century American motivational speaker and self-help author whose work emphasizes personal responsibility, goal-setting, and proactive change. This quotation circulates widely in motivational contexts—often in leadership training, self-improvement materials, and inspirational anthologies—where it functions as a succinct statement of an “agency” ethic: individuals are urged to move from passive acceptance to active problem-solving. However, I cannot confidently identify the first occasion on which Waitley wrote or said this line, nor a specific dated publication or recorded talk where it can be verified in its exact wording.

The saying reduces life’s dilemmas to a moral and practical fork: either reconcile yourself to circumstances or take ownership of altering them. Its force comes from shifting attention away from complaint and toward agency—“responsibility” implies not only desire for change but willingness to bear the costs of action (effort, risk, persistence). The quote also implies that refusing both options—neither accepting nor acting—produces frustration and stagnation. In Waitley’s motivational framework, the line functions as a call to deliberate choice: acceptance can be wise when change is impossible, but when change is possible, responsibility is the route to growth and leadership.