We tend to think of responsibility as something given to us by someone who is in a position of authority, such as a parent or an employer. And that is often the case. But responsibility is also something we must be willing to take. And after more than forty years leading and mentoring people, I have come to the conclusion that responsibility is the most important ability that a person can possess. Nothing happens to advance our potential until we step up and say, “I am responsible.” If you don’t take responsibility, you give up control of your life.
My friend Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, often says, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” That’s the right mind-set for winning. Taking responsibility for your life, your actions, your mistakes, and your growth puts you in a place where you are always able to learn and often able to win. In sports, that’s called being in the right position. When players put themselves in the right position, they are able to successfully play. It’s not a guarantee that they will make a play or that they will win. However, if they are out of position, it is almost impossible for them to make a play. Miss enough plays, and you lose the game.
Every time we fail, we can choose to put ourselves in the painful but potentially profitable place of taking responsibility so that we can take right actions for our success, or we can avoid the temporary pain of responsibility and make excuses. If we respond right to failure by taking responsibility, we can look at our failure and learn from it. As a result, we won’t be as prone to making the same mistake again. However, if we bail out on our responsibility, we don’t examine our failures and don’t learn from them. As a result, we often experience the same failures and losses repeatedly over time.
That’s what happened to Ted Williams. No, not the legendary baseball player for the Red Sox, but the man whose image was captured on video at the side of the road and posted on YouTube. You may have seen it. A homeless man stands at a freeway exit, sign in hand, hoping to receive money from passersby. A driver with a video camera stops and says, “Hey, I’m going to make you work for your dollar. Say something with that great radio voice.”1
The homeless man, wearing an army fatigue jacket, his hair wild and uncut, responds by launching into a well-practiced spiel with a magnificent voice built for radio. In fact, on the streets Ted was known as “Radio,” and he always considered his golden voice to be a gift from God.
Ted became famous overnight when the video on YouTube went viral. He appeared on the Today show, Entertainment Tonight, and Dr. Phil. It was a feel-good story that people connected with—homeless man with a talent gets a break. But Ted’s story has a lot more to it than that, and it is an illustration in the power of responsibility as the first step of learning.
When Ted was ten years old, his mother gave him a Panasonic radio. He listened to it constantly. What captivated him most were the DJs. He listened to them every night, learning their speech patterns, copying their inflections. When he was twelve, he got a tape recorder and microphone for Christmas. Every day he spent hours talking into it, creating his own radio phrases, reading news copy he’d written, rehearsing difficult sentences. He had discovered what he wanted to do with his life: be on radio.
When he turned seventeen, Ted took a step that he hoped would take him closer to his dream. A United States Army recruiter told him he could become a communications specialist. So he dropped out of high school and joined the army. What the recruiter had neglected to mention was that the job required the ability to type, and Ted couldn’t. So after finishing basic training, he was assigned to a truck maintenance unit. He was what he called “a mechanic for the South Korea outhouse patrol.”2 It was around that time that Ted started drinking heavily. That, along with other bad behavior, caused him to leave the Army with a dishonorable discharge.
Ted moved to South Carolina and eventually got a job working at a small country radio station, where he began to learn the business and see some success. After a scrape with the law and some jail time, he moved to Columbus, Ohio, and married a woman he’d known in high school. He got a job, and occasionally he worked as an emcee at a concert or nightclub. When a new radio station started in town, he landed a DJ job. “I worked hard,” Ted remembers. “I came in early every day to work on my production, recording segments and splicing them together with sound effects.”3 His show started at seven p.m. and he finished at midnight. He added commercial voiceover work to that.
In time, Ted became the number one DJ in Columbus. But he never stopped drinking—not when it and the bad behavior that often goes with it got him fired. Or when he had to change jobs. Or when his marriage fell apart. Or when he got demoted. He just kept drinking. He also smoked marijuana. Then one day his life went from horrible to worse. Some friends came to visit him and they gave him his first experience with crack cocaine. He was instantly hooked.
Ted says at first “I thought, I can just smoke on the weekends. Then, I can just smoke at night and every weekend, and everything will be fine.” He continued lying to himself and smoking more and more. “Two months after smoking my first hit of crack, I walked out on my dream job, the only thing I’d ever wanted to do with my life,” Ted recalls.4 He quit so that he could smoke crack all day. And that’s what he did. “Within three months of my first smoke, most of what I’d accumulated in my five years at the top was gone.”5
Ted went from poverty to homelessness. He lived on the streets, sleeping in the woods, on strangers’ couches, and in crack houses. He lived a never-ending cycle of addiction, drug abuse, hustling, petty theft, and homelessness punctuated with occasional stints in jail. All the while, he told himself the lie that he was doing okay. But he wasn’t. He was slowly killing himself. “Lying to yourself is a hard habit to break,” says Ted. “But the truth is, there wasn’t nothing glamorous about the life. Nothing fun about spending a few months every year in jail. Nothing positive about never taking showers, having terrible breath, rifling through rain-soaked clothes outside the Salvation Army drop box for something decent to wear…. I was nothing more than a broken man desperately hustling for the next fix.”6 That lasted twenty years!
By the time Ted was discovered on that street corner with his sign, he’d been attempting to change his life, but he was having a difficult time finding his way. His whirlwind of fame didn’t help. He still hadn’t really looked his addiction in the face and taken responsibility for himself. He accepted Dr. Phil’s offer for rehab, but he didn’t really want to go. He bailed out after only twelve days. Months later after consuming more alcohol and crack, he’d finally had enough.
“I went back to Dr. Phil, hat in hand, humility in heart, and asked for another chance,” says Ted. His second chance paid off. “For the first time since I ruined my last chance at radio in 1996, I was clean. I wasn’t cured. No addict is ever cured. But for the first time in my life, I felt free.”7 For perhaps the first time in his life he was learning. Why? Because he finally took responsibility for himself and his choices, and that is the first step of learning.
The stories of addicts like Ted Williams are sad and always strikingly similar. When Ted lived on the streets, he lied, cheated, and stole to feed his habit. He betrayed the people he loved. He begged for money from his mother so that he could travel home to New York for his father’s funeral, and when she sent it, he spent it on crack. He betrayed his wife. He abandoned his children. And he refused to take responsibility for anything.
Ted’s story is extreme, but he is not alone in his avoidance of responsibility. People do that all the time, especially when they fail or make mistakes. They just don’t want to face up to those things. If we do that long enough, a pattern begins to emerge in our lives:
Twenty years ago, Charles J. Sykes wrote a book entitled A Nation of Victims in which he decried the victim mentality that had arisen among people in the United States. In the book’s opening pages, he describes an FBI agent who embezzled two thousand dollars and lost it while gambling in Atlantic City. The man was fired, but he won reinstatement after he convinced a court that his tendency toward gambling with other people’s money was a “handicap” and therefore protected under federal law.
Sykes describes a young man who stole a car from a parking lot and was killed while driving it, and his family responded by suing the proprietor of the parking lot for failing to take steps to prevent such thefts.
He relates the story of a man convicted of flashing others more than thirty times and who admitted to exposing himself more than ten thousand times. When he was turned down for a job as a park attendant due to his arrest record, he sued based on the argument that he had never exposed himself in a park—only in libraries and Laundromats. State employment officials agreed with him and ruled that he had probably been a victim of illegal job discrimination.8
If anything, the victim mentality in the United States has only gotten worse. Rather than taking responsibility for their lives, many people are trying to take the easy way out by establishing themselves as victims of society, the economy, a conspiracy, or some alleged discrimination. A victim mind-set causes people to focus on what they cannot do instead of what they can do. It is a recipe for continued failure.
When Ted Williams sobered up and started taking responsibility for his life, he recognized that his worst problem was entitlement. It was at the root of many of his difficulties, and it was, as he said, “a problem all my life. I expected the army to put me in communications, even though I didn’t qualify. I expected radio stations to coddle me, even though I abused their trust.”9 It wasn’t until he developed gratitude for what he did have and took responsibility that his life began to turn around.
Life doesn’t always work the way we’d like it to. If we had our way, it would be easier. It would be fair. It would be more fun. There’d be no pain and suffering. We would have to work only if we felt like it. And we would never die. But that isn’t how life works. Life isn’t easy. It’s not fair. We do experience pain. Even the best of jobs includes unpleasant tasks and has times of drudgery. And every one of us will die.
Is that fair? No. Life isn’t fair. Johnny Carson said, “If life were fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.” In life, we all get better than we deserve at times and worse than we deserve at others. And there is no guarantee that it will balance out in the end. The Bible says that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and he gives rain to the just and unjust.10 We can get stuck asking why. But seeking answers to that question rarely helps. We may never know why things happen. If we focus on the why, we may never make real progress in our lives.
Another pitfall is comparing ourselves to others. That can lead to tremendous frustration and dissatisfaction, because you can always find someone better off than you are. I came across a humorous take on this recently written by a woman who says that in her next life, she would like to be a bear. She writes,
If you’re a bear, you get to hibernate. You do nothing but sleep for six months. I could deal with that. Before you hibernate, you’re supposed to eat yourself stupid. I could deal with that, too. If you’re a bear, you birth your children (who are the size of walnuts) while you’re sleeping and wake to partially grown, cute cuddly cubs. I could definitely deal with that. If you’re a mama bear, everyone knows you mean business. You swat anyone who bothers your cubs. If your cubs get out of line, you swat them too. I could deal with that. If you’re a bear, your mate expects you to wake up growling. He expects that you will have hairy legs and excess body fat. Yup… Gonna be a bear!11
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” That’s true, but only if you make an effort to understand how life works and accept it. Instead of focusing on why things happen, we are better off learning how things work. There are more lessons to be learned, and those lessons prepare us for future battles.
Another pattern that people fall into when they don’t take responsibility is what I call “blamestorming.” That’s the creative process used for finding an appropriate scapegoat. One time I was counseling a man who had made a mess of his life and relationships. As we got started in the process of working on his issues, he told me, “There are three things wrong with me: my wife, my mother, and my son.” Now that’s blamestorming.
It’s my understanding that insurance companies are the recipients of many creative excuses from drivers who refuse to take responsibility for themselves. I enjoy reading these kinds of things, and I hope you will, too. Here are some of my favorites:
“As I reached the intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision.”
“An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.”
“The telephone pole was approaching fast. I attempted to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end.”
“The indirect cause of this accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth.”
“I had been driving my car for four years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.”
“I was on my way to the doctor’s with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave way, causing me to have an accident.”
“To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front of me, I struck the pedestrian.”
Author and editor Christopher Buckley tells a great story about an incident that occurred with actor David Niven, who starred in the original Pink Panther movie. Buckley writes,
My favorite faux pas story—we tell it with reverence in my family—happened to David Niven, who was a pal of my dad. He was the kindest man on earth, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. A sweet, kind man. So he’s at a white tie ball and he struck up a conversation with a man. They’re standing at the foot of a grand staircase and two women appear at the top of the staircase and start to walk down and David nudges the man and says, “I say, that must be the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The man stiffens and says, “That’s my wife.”
Desperate for a lifeline, David says, “I mean the other one.”
The man stiffens again and says, “That’s my daughter!”
And David says, “I didn’t say it!”
Buckley goes on to say, “We call that in our house the ‘David Niven Defense.’ It does come in handy.”12
Any form of blamestorming may be handy in the moment, but it’s not helpful in the long run. You can’t grow and learn if your focus is on finding someone else to blame instead of looking at your own shortcomings.
Who is responsible for what happens in your life? Do you believe you should take personal responsibility? Or do you feel as if that is outside of your control and there’s little or nothing you can do about it?
Psychologists say that some people possess an internal locus of control, where they rely primarily on themselves for the gains and losses in their lives. Others possess an external locus of control, where they blame others when something goes wrong. Which group is more successful? The group that takes personal responsibility. Which people are more content? The ones who take personal responsibility. Which people learn from their mistakes and keep growing and improving? The people who take responsibility.
Taking responsibility for your life is a choice. That doesn’t mean you believe you are in control of everything in your life. That’s not humanly possible. But you can take responsibility for yourself and every choice you have. I love the way chiropractor and author Eric Plasker looks at our choices in a piece called “I Choose My Life.” You may be tempted to speed through the lines that follow, but please don’t. There is insight to be gained in many of the choices Plasker puts together:
| I choose to die. | I choose to live. |
| I choose to hate. | I choose to love. |
| I choose to close. | I choose to open. |
| I choose to cry. | I choose to laugh. |
| I choose to deny. | I choose to believe. |
| I choose to ignore. | I choose to hear. |
| I choose to be right. | I choose to relate. |
| I choose to scatter. | I choose to focus. |
| I choose to work. | I choose to play. |
| I choose to be angry. | I choose to accept. |
| I choose to despair. | I choose to hope. |
| I choose to give up. | I choose to persist. |
| I choose to suffer. | I choose to heal. |
| I choose to destroy. | I choose to create. |
| I choose to fail. | I choose to succeed. |
| I choose to extinguish. | I choose to ignite. |
| I choose to get by. | I choose to excel. |
| I choose to follow. | I choose to lead. |
| I choose to drift. | I choose to commit. |
| I choose my choices. | I choose my life.13 |
Abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher asserted, “God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not a choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.” How will you approach your life? Will you simply allow life to happen to you? Or will you seize the choices you make with enthusiasm and responsibility?
When we fail to take responsibility, not only do we develop a victim mentality, embrace an unrealistic perspective of how life works, engage in blamestorming, and give away the choice to control our lives, but we also eliminate any real possibility of growth for success. And that is the real tragedy of failing to be responsible.
Real success is a journey. We have to approach it with a long-term mind-set. We have to hang in there, stay focused, and keep moving forward. Excuses are like exits along the road of success that lead us nowhere. Taking the exit is easy, but it gets us off track. It is impossible to go from excuses to success. So we need to get back on the road, keep moving forward. If we want to do something and we take responsibility, we’ll find a way. If not, we’ll find an excuse. That may take the pressure off of us and make us feel better in the short term, but in the long run it won’t make us successful.
Richard Bach said, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they are yours.” I may not like it, but I am responsible for who I am and where I am today. My present circumstances are a direct result of my past choices. My future will be the result of my current thoughts and actions. I am responsible, and so are you.
In You Gotta Keep Dancin’, Tim Hansel says, “Pain is inevitable but misery is optional.” A similar thing can be said when it comes to taking responsibility. Losses are inevitable, but excuses are optional. When we move from excuses to responsibility, our lives begin to change dramatically. Here’s how.
When you take responsibility for yourself, you take responsibility for your learning. The earlier you do this, the better the potential results. Professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William Raspberry had good advice regarding the importance of taking responsibility and making right choices when we are young. He observed,
If you want to be thought of as a solid, reliable pillar of your community when you’re fifty, you can’t be an irresponsible, corner-cutting exploiter at twenty-five…. The time to worry about your reputation is before you have one. You determine your reputation by deciding who and what you are and by keeping that lofty vision of yourself in mind, even when you’re having a rip-roaring good time.
If you take responsibility when you’re young, you have a better chance of gaining wisdom as you get older. For some of us, it takes a long time. I sometimes feel that only after turning sixty-five did I begin to understand life. Now that I’m officially a senior citizen, I can say there are two things I know about my life. First, it has contained many surprises. My life didn’t turn out like I thought it would. Some things turned out better than I imagined, some things worse. No matter who you are, it’s impossible to know how your life will turn out.
Second, as long as I take responsibility for the things I can control in my life and try my best to learn from them, I can feel contented. Unfortunately, my personal challenge has been keeping myself from trying to control things outside my sphere of influence. Whenever I’ve overreached in that way and things have gone wrong, it has caused me to lose focus, waste energy, and feel discouraged. That has been a hard lesson for me.
If you can find the right balance where you take responsibility for the things you can control and let go of the things you cannot, you will accelerate your learning process. But even if you learn the lesson late, you can still benefit from it. That was true for Ted Williams. He was in his fifties when he finally took that first step. And as a result, he is learning and growing and improving his life.
Taking responsibility for yourself does not mean taking yourself too seriously. When you do that, it carries over into a negative perspective in other areas of your life. Henri Frederic Amiel said, “We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.” Taking responsibility doesn’t mean cultivating a negative attitude. It means being willing to see things from a better perspective.
I’ve met people who allow their losses to overwhelm them. They say things like, “That incident ruined my life” or “That person makes me so mad.” The truth is that nothing can ruin your life or make you mad without your permission! If you find yourself thinking along those lines, stop immediately. You have the power to choose another way of thinking, and you can learn how to do that by maintaining a proper perspective.
In 2009 when golfer Tom Watson was fifty-nine years old, he competed in the British Open on a very difficult course. He hadn’t won a major tournament in twenty-five years, yet he was leading prior to the final hole of play. If he could par the final hole with a four, he would win. But his second shot took a hard bounce and went over the green. He ended up with a bogey, which led him into a playoff with Stewart Cink, who won the tournament.
What a disappointing loss. Media members were silent as they filed into the press tent after Watson’s loss. What was the veteran golfer’s response? “This ain’t a funeral, you know,” he joked. He was able to laugh about it, because he saw things in the proper perspective. It wasn’t the end of the world for him.
The best learners are people who don’t see their losses and failures as permanent. They see them as temporary. Or as Patricia Sellers once put it, “The most successful [people] at bouncing back view failure not like a cancer but, rather, like puberty: awkward and uncomfortable, but a transforming experience that precedes maturity.”14
What’s the major difference between people who succeed and people who don’t? It’s not failing. Both groups fail. However, the ones who take responsibility for themselves learn from their failures and do not repeat them.
If you think about it, how did you learn to walk when you were a baby? You tried something that didn’t work and fell down. Then you tried something else that didn’t work, and fell down. You probably tried hundreds of approaches—maybe thousands—all of which taught you what didn’t work when it came to walking. And finally, you tried something that did work.
That’s the way you learned to walk, eat, talk, ride a bike, throw a ball, and all the other basic tasks of living. Why would you think you’ll ever get to a place where you can learn without failing and making mistakes? If you want to learn more, you need to do more. But you also need to pay attention to what’s not working and make adjustments accordingly.
In his audiobook The Psychology of Achievement, Brian Tracy tells about four men who became millionaires by the age of thirty-five. He says each one was involved in an average of seventeen businesses before finding the right one for him. What’s the message? To win, you can’t just keep attempting the same thing over and over again. You must stop, take responsibility for your choices, reflect on what went wrong and what went right, make adjustments, and try again. That’s the only way to be successful.
William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, remarked: “Every success I know has been reached because the person was able to analyze defeat and actually profit from it in the next undertaking.” Failure isn’t the best teacher. Neither is experience. Only evaluated experience teaches us. That’s where the profit lies in any experience we have.
Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Every time that you take responsibility, face your fear, and move forward despite experiencing losses, failures, mistakes, and disappointments, you become stronger. And if you keep doing the things you ought to do when you ought to do them, the day will come when you will get to do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
This ability comes only if you take responsibility for becoming the person God created you to be, not someone else. In his book Confidence: How To Succeed at Being Yourself, Alan McGinnis wrote:
The Hasidic rabbi, Zuscha, was asked on his deathbed what he thought the kingdom of God would be like. He replied, “I don’t know. But one thing I do know. When I get there I am not going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Moses? Why weren’t you David?’ I am only going to be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Zuscha? Why weren’t you fully you?’ ”15
We need to be asking ourselves a question similar to that one: Are we being ourselves? Are we taking full responsibility for that task? If our answer is yes, it makes us stronger day by day.
The ultimate step in taking responsibility is making sure our actions line up with our words. Jeff O’Leary, author of The Centurion Principles, advised, “Sign your work at the end of each day. If you can’t do that, find a new profession.” If you are willing to put your name on anything you do, that indicates a high level of integrity. To put your life on the line indicates an even higher one.
That’s what author and consultant Frances Cole Jones describes in her book The Wow Factor. She writes,
In the Marines, “riggers”—the people who pack (i.e., reassemble after use) parachutes for other Marines—have to make at least one jump a month. Who packed their ’chute? They do: One of the parachutes that they packed for others to use is chosen at random, and the rigger has to “jump it.” This system helps make sure that no one gets sloppy—after all, “The chute you’re packing may be your own.”
The Roman army used a similar technique to make sure bridges and aqueducts were safe: The person who designed the arches had to stand under each arch while the scaffolding was being removed.
If you want your company to last as long as Roman bridges have, ask yourself if everyone is truly responsible for outcomes by these measures—and if you yourself are. Are you performing every task with the concentration and commitment that you might if a life depended on it?16
It may sound like hyperbole when Jones asks if you are taking responsibility for the tasks you perform as if your life depends on it, but it’s not really extreme. Why? Because our lives do depend on what we do. It took Ted Williams over fifty years and nearly cost him his life to learn that lesson. But the stakes are no less high for you and me. The life we have is the only life we get here on earth, and it’s not a dress rehearsal. Every minute we waste is gone forever. We can either choose to take responsibility for what we do with it, or make excuses.
I hope, like me, you are choosing to face reality and take responsibility. If you do that, then you will be ready to dig in and focus on improvement, which is the subject of the next chapter.