If you've not figured out how to hold yourself accountable financially, you shouldn't even think about making any real investment because it won't take time before you exhaust all the money in your hand and take your investment immediately. It involves discipline, proper planning, and the ability to stick with your plan. Big firms do it and if you take it seriously, even though your income might be little, the proceeds of the income will amaze you.
If you don't take your financial accountability seriously and want to allow everything to fall into place by chance, you will learn a hard lesson the bad way.
I fully agree with you, we are responsible for our own actions in life and need to accept the choices we make. When it comes to financial accountability there is no point in searching for the mistakes in others, in the end we always have the final decision in where we are going to spend, save or invest our money. This doesn't mean a good investor is not going to make mistakes. Everybody is going to have losses in their life, that is just part of the game. As soon as there is risk involved there is a possibility for us to lose our money and we need to live with that. The important part is to learn from our mistakes and try to not to repeat them. Luck is not something we should be counting on, because it's mostly having an impact short term on our finances. Over a long enough period of time, our own skill and making financially sound investments is going to outweigh luck. Which is why I keep track of all my investments and will keep checking if I made the right call on my trades. We should all own our mistakes and learn from them for the future.