Want to know one thing that virtually guarantees your success? It’s responsibility. In this video I want to give you five reasons responsibility if vital to your success in any endeavor.

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War 2 once said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

If you want to be great, if you want respect, if you want honor in what you do, you must learn responsibility. Responsibility is assuming the burden of influence. And it is the price of greatness, according to Churchill, one of the most consequential prime ministers in all of British history. I think he was right.   

What is Responsibility?

What is responsibility? According to dictionary.com, responsibility is “the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one’s power, control, or management.” Responsibility is the opposite of blame, though it’s tempered with how much you can contribute to the solution to a problem.

• Blame says, “It’s not my fault.” 
  Responsibility says, “I helped cause that problem, let me fix it.”

• Blame asks a direct report, “You’re messing up, can you quit doing that?”
  Responsibility says, “How can I help you fix this issue?”

• Blame yells at a child in a rage, “Why are you so careless?”
  Responsibility says, “I’m sorry I was upset with you. Let me help you clean that up.”

Responsibility is the doorway to success in so many areas. In fact, it’s vital to your progress at work, at home, in life — responsibility may be the key you’ve been looking for to unlock advancement in a particular area. Here are five reasons responsibility is vital to your success. 

#1 Responsibility Ensures Personal Accountability 

When you assume the responsibility of a project, a job, a relationship, or an outcome, you assume a consequence for failure that was not there before. For instance, instead of thinking this project can fail and it’s not a big deal because a committee planned it, you start thinking “I’m responsible for this project and it can’t fail because I would look bad if it did.” Or “I would lose my job.” Because of those consequences, responsibility bequeaths a level of personal accountability that wasn’t there before. And it insures against poor quality. The ancients knew this very well.

Consider Hammurabi’s Code. Hammurabi was a Babylonian king in the 18th century BC. He is credited with one of the more developed legal systems of its time. And he knew about responsibility in a way that ensured people took it seriously. Especially builders. Here’s what the code says,    

“If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.”

Build a defective house and the builder dies. That’ll end a career. Just consider how that consequence might affect the personal accountability for Babylonian builders. Quality will be insured by the life of the general contractor. And that would positively affect the condition of Mesopotamian construction. If that house didn’t stand and someone dies, the builder also loses his life. Ouch! 

And yet, this ancient law illustrates the quality that improves when responsibility is inserted into your life.  When you take responsibility, actual responsibility for your actions with real consequences, you become accountable. And that will take your projects, your job, your career, your family, and your marriage to new heights.

Quality will be insured by the life of the general contractor. And that would positively affect the condition of Mesopotamian construction. If that house didn’t stand and someone dies, the builder also loses his life. Ouch! 

Brandon Clay – Total Calling

Once again, #1 responsibility ensures personal accountability.  

#2 Responsibility Leads to Honesty About Your Problems

Once you assume responsibility for whether something succeeds or fails, a shift happens. You start thinking more honestly about the issue in a way you didn’t before. Instead of pointing fingers, you point to yourself then to the problem. You aim for a more authentic understanding of the situation because you’re not blaming anybody else.

Fail to assume responsibility and you’ll fool yourself. You become disconnected from reality and that helps nobody. Counselors have observed this pattern for years. This is a more extreme situation with an abuser, but the concept is just as true. The Hague Psychologist wrote, 

(Blame-shifting is) “Escaping responsibility. . . Blame-shifting is an emotionally abusive behavior or tactic…abusers have difficulty taking responsibility for problems. They go as far as necessary to attribute blame for their circumstances to anyone else, even if it may sound somewhat conspiratorial. Similarly, they don’t accept ownership of their emotions. They typically express both negative and positive feelings with language like, ‘You make me so mad.’”

Did you catch that? The abuser thought the other person was responsible for their anger. Wrong. Once you shift into blame mode, honesty goes out the window. It’s her fault, his fault, their fault – but it’s never your fault. At least when you’re stuck in a blame trap. That’s why responsibility has an almost magical ability to focus your attention on an accurate understanding about issues. When you stop blaming others, you begin to see a more clear picture of reality.

Once again, responsibility leads to honesty about your problems.  

#3 Responsibility Inspires Solutions to Problems 

As mentioned before, the opposite of responsibility is blame. And blame is crippling to organizations, companies, ministries, and families. It causes shutdowns, not solutions. Marilyn Paul wrote on the Systems Thinker, 

“In fact, blame costs money. When the vice president of marketing and the vice president of R&D are blaming each other for quality problems in product development, they can’t focus on working together to bring the best products to market. Their finger pointing results in lost sales potential.”

On the other hand, responsibility looks for a solution to the problem — not to the person who caused it. Sure, there may be a time to assign culpability and even fire someone when someone is really wrong in an organization, but that’s not the norm. The norm should be looking for ways to solve problems, not point fingers. And that’s exactly what responsibility does. Responsibility inspires solutions to problems – that’s our third reason responsibility is vital to your success.  

#4 Responsibility Empowers You

At the risk of being too obvious, I’m going to point something out about the word: responsibility. Responsibility looks very much like a compound word that includes “response” and “ability”. For the response part, you can respond to issues in your immediate surroundings. For the ability part, you have the capacity to act. You can do something. 

That means you’re not a victim. You’re not a victim of your circumstances, of your bad decisions, of your boss’s whims, of your kids’ bad behavior. “Woe is me” may be a gut-level response, but don’t stay there. Instead, feel the energy that is intrinsic in your ability to respond. Because it’s there. You have that power – through responsibility. In fact, responsibility empowers you to change so many situations.  

Business strategist Jeff Olson wrote, “When you don’t take responsibility, when you blame others, circumstances, fate or chance, you give away your power. When you take and retain full responsibility – even when others are wrong or the situation is genuinely unfair – you keep your life’s reins in your own hands”.

So take a page from Olson’s playbook: keep life’s reins in your own hands. If you’re not where you wanted to be 10 years ago, don’t blame your school, your spouse, or your mom or dad. You were the one who took that job, invested poorly, or took the turns to get where you are today. Take responsibility. That is the path to get you out of your current situation to be empowered to change your current situation. Once again, responsibility empowers you.

#5 Responsibility Provides Meaning To Your Life

We’re at the final reason that responsibility is vital to your success – and this one may feel like it comes out of left field. We’re going to start with a quote and illustrate it with a thought experiment. Here goes.  

Psychologist Jordan Peterson once wrote, “It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”

Responsibility is what gives people meaning in life. Not in shirking obligations. It’s certainly not found in blaming other people. Instead, our lives somehow take on significance when we assume responsibility.”

Do you get what Peterson is saying? Responsibility gives meaning to our lives. Not happiness, not pleasure, not escaping duties. Responsibility provides meaning to our lives.

Now for the thought experiment. 

Imagine you had everything you could want within the bounds of Christian virtue. A beautiful home, on a beach, a nice yacht, exotic cars, and enough money in the bank — but you had no obligations. No marriage, no children, no job, no projects, no career. Nothing to give you anything to do — because you had no responsibilities. Maybe this would be fine for a little while — but even billionaires need something to do. Why? Because somehow our meaning is connected to our duties. As Peterson puts it, “our lives somehow take on significance when we assume responsibility.”     

Biblical Basis for Responsibility 

If you know something about the creation mandate, this may not be surprising. The creation mandate is the idea that God gave to Adam and Eve a job to do right after he created them. Here it is in Genesis 1:26: 

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Right after he made people, God gave them responsibilities. They were to reign over and care for salmon, bald eagles, and cattle. Entwined in their nature (and our nature) as image-bearers of God, we all have responsibilities. Maybe we don’t have to care for a Garden of Eden, but we are given work, and projects, and things to do. It comes with being human, made in God’s image. So that is why our meaning is connected to the responsibilities we have. And that’s also why responsibility is vital to your success. 

At the end of the day, if you succeed at everything else but lose ultimate meaning in the process, have you really succeeded? 

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All the best!