Your Life Improves in Proportion to How Much Responsibility You Take.

More ownership equals more freedom.

Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash

Want to change your life for the better?

Start with taking more responsibility. Simple to understand but not easy to implement.

Who you will be in 5 years largely depends on the amount of responsibility you’re willing to take for your life.

Responsibility creates meaning. It provides a sense of purpose for your actions and connects them with a higher purpose. Without responsibility, you are living life blindly. Your actions reflect impulse rather than intention.

One bricklayer may think he is building a wall for a church in order to make ends meet. Another bricklayer building the same wall feels like he is contributing to the work of God.

They are both doing the same job, but have different levels of personal responsibility for the work they do. Therefore, opportunities for meaning and growth lay where responsibility has been neglected.

Responsibility requires self-awareness. You can’t attempt to hit a target you refuse to see. And change begins when you start to accept more ownership for your actions and behavior.

A lack of responsibility creates a lack of opportunity for growth.

We all have people in our lives that take no responsibility for what happens to them. They blame everyone but themselves and constantly paint themselves as a victim of their circumstances.

I’ve seen this first hand by having a parent who refuses to acknowledge how much emotional pain they have caused the family.

Rather than taking the responsibility to heal and mend relationships, they’ve become stuck in their own pride and ego. They even blame others for the actions they’ve taken.

How much do these people tend to achieve in their lives? Zero.

How much do these people grow and improve themselves? Zero.

Avoidance of responsibility for your life is the avoidance of growth.

“Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder,” writes Jordan Peterson in his book Beyond Order.

How To Take More Responsibility:

I want you to try this experiment.

For the next 30 days, no matter what happens you will decide to take full ownership of any problems or setbacks you experience. Even if you feel it wasn’t your fault.

You don’t need to announce it to anyone but only accept in your mind that you are 100% responsible for what happened.

A critical project at work gets delayed? Your fault.

You're late for an important meeting because of traffic? Your fault.

Your child is rude to their teachers at school? Your fault.

When you first start, you’ll find it really uncomfortable. You might even curse and swear at me. Go for your life.

But after a while, you’ll gain clarity on how you think. You start to notice the bullsh*t you tell yourself. And how much of your power and control you cede to circumstances and the action of others.

You can never really control what happens or what others do. All you can control is your own emotions and how you choose to react in any given situation. That’s your power. Don’t give it up so easily.

The point of this experiment is to train your mind to avoid casting yourself as the victim. The victimhood trap is easy to fall into. It provides a convenient excuse and gets you off the hook. But nothing grows when you’re the victim.

Former navy seal Jocko Willink calls this “Extreme Ownership”. This practice means you a responsible not just for those tasks which you directly control but also for those you don’t.

For Willink, true leaders are those who take responsibility and accountability for the outcome. No matter what the circumstances.

The more ownership you take the more freedom you enjoy. Once you accept that you are directly in control of everything that happens in your life, you are liberated to take action to improve it.

You don’t need to wait for others to be “ready” or for the timing to be “perfect”. Waiting for others to be ready is giving up your freedom. And Perfection is just procrastination cloaked in a nice word.

I’ve experienced firsthand how much an increased sense of responsibility can change your life.

Prior to 2021, I was pretty loose with my personal finances. I didn’t go overboard on my spending, but I never really knew where exactly my money went.

I could be impulsive and never had a good system to manage my money.

At the start of last year, I decide to purchase a block of land and build my first house. The looming responsibility of a mortgage weighed heavily on me.

I had to get my shit together. I now owed the bank half a million dollary doos (official Australian currency) and needed to pay them back monthly.

I started to take full responsibility for where every dollar went in my bank account. I sorted out how much I was saving every month, where my money was being invested, and audited my spending habits.

I stopped blaming my parents for not teaching me the right skills, the education system for not preparing me properly, or my workplace for not paying me enough.

A year on my financial life has been changed for the better. I have less stress knowing that I have a bulletproof financial system that I’ve automated to make creating wealth a certainty, not a lottery.

Taking responsibility to achieve a big goal changed me in the process.

What Does Taking More Responsibility Look Like?

Opportunities for growth are hidden behind where responsibility has been neglected.

What areas of your life could you take more responsibility for? Here are some universal but often neglected areas of life:

• Career: Not letting your terrible boss or lazy colleagues dictate how much effort you put into your work. You can start to take more personal leadership by being proactive in producing high-quality work. You never know who is watching and how one project could lead to your next opportunity.

• Learning: Most people stop learning after they graduate and coast on the skills they learned for as long as possible. If you don’t want to be left behind, start taking control of your learning. With the abundance of high-quality courses on Udemy, SkillShare, and even good YouTube tutorials, you can teach yourself any skill you like, whenever you like for a low to no cost.

• Personal finance: Like my example above, if you don’t learn to manage your money, your money will manage you. I’ve seen too many people stay in terrible jobs or turn down good opportunities because of money. Money is a tool that serves you. Become a master of managing money or remain a slave to it.

Take an audit of your life and see where you can start to take more responsibility. You can do this quietly and watch the results for yourself.

In 2022, I am taking more responsibility for my diet and what goes into my mouth. I’ve had issues with my gut for a while and have successfully ignored it for a number of years. Not anymore.

Summary:

Taking more responsibility for your life is not an easy thing to do. But that’s the point. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it already.

But that’s where your unfair advantage lies. If you’re reading to the end of this article, you’ve got a strong desire to take full ownership over the outcomes in your life.

Take stock of your life and ask yourself: where can I start to take more responsibility?

Start there and don’t stop.

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