Why Responsibility is A Superpower

Today, you'll learn why responsibility is a superpower.

It allows you to take control of your life, solve your problems, and shape your future. Taking responsibility makes you more powerful, your life more meaningful, and your success more likely. When you take more responsibility, you'll stop complaining, resolve resentment, and stop avoidance.

Let's explore, each of these points in detail:

Responsibility Puts You in Control of Your Life

The more you're in control of your life, the more you determine what does and doesn't happen.

The more responsibility you take, the more you determine what happens. The more you determine what happens, the more control over your life you take.

Let's say you want to read more. If you take responsibility for reading more, you'll look for small pockets of time in your day in which you can read. You respond to your desire and take a proactive, high-agency approach to realize it.

That's how responsibility increases your control over your life.

Responsibility Is Essential to Solving Your Problems

If you don't respond to your problems, you won't solve them.

Fundamentally, responsibility describes your ability to respond to something.

When you have a problem and you take responsibility for ity ou can respond to it and solve it.

If you have trouble falling asleep and respond to this problem you'll try to understand why it exists. You will research potential solutions, and experiment with the most promising solutions. Eventually, this will lead to you solving your problem and falling asleep quickly.

The alternative is to not respond to your problems.

That's the path of avoidance, distractions, and denial. Walking down that path gives your problems time to grow. It allows small problems to turn into catastrophes that have the power to ruin your life.

The alternative is to respond to your problems. This allows you to solve them. Thus, responsibility is essential to solving your problems.

Responsibility Allows You to Shape Your Future

If you avoid responsibility you give away power over your life. You give other people, big corporations, and external circumstances the power to direct your life.

If you don't respond to your problems, wishes, or desires they will. This means they will determine your future. Not you. That's not something you want.

You want to create your future intentionally so it's as close as possible to the one you really want. Responsibility allows you to do that. When you respond to a problem, you can solve it in a way that works best for you. You can also respond to it so that it makes creating the future you want more likely. When you fulfill one of your desires, you can do it so that it contributes to your ideal future. When you respond to a surprise in your life, you can do it so that it furthers the creation of your ideal life.

When you take responsibility you respond to challenges and use them with intention to create the life you want. That's how you shape your future with responsibility, instead of letting others do it for you.

Responsibility Makes Your Life More Meaningful

A life without meaning feels not worth living.

But, few people know that responsibility can make life feel worth living.

When you take responsibility your actions immediately become more meaningful. They have a positive or negative impact. And once you respond, your actions carry a certain weight and thus meaningfulness.

When you take responsibility for improving your health seemingly meaningless actions suddenly become meaningful. The food you buy, how well you cook, or your knowledge about nutrition, health, and food.

When you take responsibility for someone else like a parent, partner, or child the same transformation happens.

Your daily actions, decisions, and behaviors suddenly feel way more meaningful than before. The way you talk to them acquires new significance. The things you sacrifice for their well-being feel different. Your perspective shifts from self-centeredness to selflessness. That's why few parents see their actions as meaningless. It's also why parents see their lives with children as significantly more meaningful than before.

By imbuing your actions with new significance, responsibility can make your life more meaningful than it ever was before.

Responsibility is the Antidote to Complaining

Complaining is toxic. It poisons your life, murders your hope, and sinks your relationships.

Responsibility is complaining's antidote.

Think about it. If you can't respond to something and can't take responsibility for it what's your most likely response?

Exactly: Complaining. That's why so many people do it. They either feel like they have no response-ability or want to avoid the effort that responding to something requires. So, they complain. All. The. Time. If you complain long enough you become unbearable to be around and that's not something you want to be.

So, you take responsibility instead.

The moment you take responsibility, you're likely to stop complaining. After all, now you can do something about whatever you were complaining about before. The more you do something about it, the more you realize additional opportunities to take more responsibility, and the less time or energy you want to waste complaining. Now, you're on the path to solving whatever you were complaining about and once you've done that, you won't complain anymore.

If you notice yourself complaining stop and ask yourself "How can I take responsibility for this?"

Then take it and watch yourself stop complaining.

Responsibility Roots Out Resentment

Resentment is another poison you need to remove from your life.

Resentments are often unexpressed desires that aren't getting met.

You can only get your desires met by talking about them with others. Taking responsibility for that means to take responsibility for starting these conversations. It means to take responsibility for having them in a productive way and for bringing them to a mutually beneficial end.

Without taking responsibility for these conversations, you'll rarely have them. Then, you allow resentment to fester with horrific consequences.

It's much better and easier in the long-term, to take responsibility for them instead.

Responsibility Cures Avoidance

Avoidance is lethal.

The more things you avoid, the more they can grow from small problems into big problems.

Responding to what you want to avoid stops this vicious cycle early.

Instead of letting small problems grow, you respond to them early and resolve them quickly. Then you avoid fewer and fewer things. If you practice this long enough, the number of things you avoid will shrink to a manageable number. Eventually, they can even disappear completely.

That's how responsibility cures avoidance.

Responsibility Increases Your Likelihood of Success

Combine these positive effects of responsibility and you can see how it massively increases your odds of success.

If you take responsibility you take more control of your life and intentionally create your ideal future.

You put yourself in a position where you can respond to your problems and solve them.

You take the reins of creating your future, instead of handing over power to other people or big corporations.

You imbue seemingly meaningless actions with a new sense of meaning and make life worth living.

You stop complaining, root out resentment, and cure avoidance.

What's more, is that responsibility is a rare trait.

Most people avoid it. I'll write another letter on why that is first but you know that taking responsibility is hard. Harder than its alternative: complaining, passivity, and blaming.

Just by taking responsibility you set yourself apart from most people AND reap all the benefits I've outlined above.

And that's why responsibility is a superpower.