Take Responsibility

We're starting off with a tough one. This is perhaps the hardest one to understand. It took me a while to fully comprehend it. It's not easy to explain, so chew on it a while and hopefully you'll come to see what I'm talking about.

I learned this from one of my teachers in school. As I've gotten older, I find that I conflate memories, so I may be ascribing this to the wrong teacher, but I'm pretty sure I learned it from Mr. Robbins, my 11th and 12th grade math teacher. 

He told us to take responsibility.

We make excuses for things. Excuses are ways of forgiving ourselves for things we did. For example, if I'm late for work, that is something I did. I arrived late. I may offer the excuse that I was late because traffic was bad. Traffic was something outside my control and so it wasn't my fault that I was late for work.

We must distinguish between excuses and reasons, so said Mr. Robbins. The reason I was late for work was that traffic was bad...and I didn't anticipate that. It is the reason. I can choose to turn that reason into an excuse: What could I do? Traffic was bad. I can't make the traffic good. There was nothing I could do about it.

Now for the hard part. Who is responsible for me being late? The traffic is just a thing, it is not a person, it is not sentient, it exhibited no intent or purpose, it does not know me, it doesn't know where I live or work and it doesn't care, because it has no capacity for caring.

Getting to work on time was my responsibility. It was up to me. Had I taken my responsibility seriously, I could have checked the traffic and left earlier. Or left earlier just in case there would be traffic. Or called ahead to at least give warning that I would be late (which may not be good enough, but at least is being responsible).

I hope you're still with me, because now it gets a little tougher. Forget the traffic. What if I was late because I got a flat tire. We usually don't leave for work extra early in case we get a flat tire, because it so rarely happens. And if it happened to happen on the morning when there was an important meeting at which I was the keynote presenter and lots of important people with important things to do got held up because I was late, well, that's not my tire's problem. It's my problem. Like it or not, I have to take responsibility for it.

Here's the key thing. You can still take responsibility, even if the reason was something out of your control. It's usually not fun to do so, and it may not feel fair. But if the result is that people were hurt, damaged, insulted, annoyed, inconvenienced or had their time wasted because of what happened to you, it is time to step up and take responsibility for it. It may not completely compensate the other person for their loss, but it may fix it some. It may even improve your stature in their eyes. But most importantly, it is the right thing to do; it makes you a better person.

There was one thing that Mr. Robbins did not tell us, but that I have found to be true, and it's the best part. When you've taken responsibility for something that you could have just excused yourself for, it actually makes you feel good. It gives you a sense of dignity. Taking responsibility restores some of the control that you might not have had over the circumstances that got you into trouble in the first place.