Skip to main content

Taking Responsibility

One of the most liberating and terrifying things you can do is to accept responsibility. For everything. Many of us grow up with the incredibly limiting belief that anything that doesn't go our way is someone else's fault. It's your teacher's fault, your friend's fault, your boss's fault, your partner's fault, the world's fault - whatever, as long as it's not your fault.

There is no surer way to hold yourself back than blaming your life and your setbacks on other people.

A particular pet peeve of mine is people who blame their character flaws on something out of their control. This takes a lot of different forms, such as, "I've got a bad temper, so he had it coming", or "Yeah, I'm just not good with responding to messages", or "I'm no good at talking to girls", or recently the popular anti-social excuse "I'm just not comfortable around people". Yes, I know that there are biological propensities for violence, anti-social behavior, and just about every other potential character flaw, but there's nothing worse than blaming malleable character traits on things out of your control. The mere belief that these things are unchangeable givens is at once a terrible excuse for our own behavior as well as a confining cage squeezing the life out of our future selfs.

The sheer magnitude of important stuff not taught in school is fairly overwhelming, but how to deal with other people, and how to deal with our own thoughts, emotions, and especially shortcomings - in other words, skills related to emotional intelligence - are perhaps the most glaring omission. It turns out that these are skills that can be learned, and the value is arguably greater than anything else you may learn in life. How do I know that we can change the way we deal with other people? Because I've seen it in others, and I've seen it in myself.

No one can force you to change. No one can force you to become a better person. It has to start from you - there is no other way. It starts from simply accepting responsibility for everything in your life. Once you accept personal responsibility, your life is something in your control. It's hard, it's painful, and sometimes it really, really sucks, but it's also the healthiest thing you can do if you're looking to grow as a person.

From now on, rather than looking outward and directing your blame at others, look inward. You'll be amazed at how freeing it is.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Korean Is Hard For Native English Speakers

A couple of days ago, as an experiment, I wrote my first blog post ever in a non-English language . It was an attempt to explain some of the reasons that Korean is hard to learn for native English speakers, so I figured I might as well try to write it in Korean. Those of you who actually read Korean can see how awkward the attempt was =). In any case, the post came from an email conversation I had with The Korean from  Ask a Korean , a fantastically well-written blog about all things Korea from the perspective of a Korean who moved to the United States during high school. Since I tend to geek out on language things, I figured I might as well post part of that conversation. An edited version follows. --------- Out of the languages that I've attempted to learn so far, Korean has been the hardest. I've done a lot of meta thinking about learning Korean, and I think there are a number of reasons it's difficult for non-Koreans (and especially Westerners) to learn: 1) Obvi...
9 comments
Read more

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther...
5 comments
Read more

Pushing Python Performance With Parallelization

TL;DR: For certain types of programs, you can take advantage of idiosyncrasies in the Python interpreter and the host operating system to create real shared memory between processes and get some pretty good parallelization. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. As a developer, you've probably heard this before, and what it means basically is that you shouldn't waste time optimizing code unless it's already doing what you want it to do. We also live in an era of seemingly unlimited resources with AWS/Google Compute, and often the easiest way to get higher throughput in your programs or service is just to pay for more instances. But sometimes it's fun to see what sort of performance we can get on a simple laptop (and save some cash at the same time). So anyway ... I've been working on this thing, and it took too damn long to run, and I needed to run it lots and lots of times ... so, it was time to optimize. Basic optimization has two main steps: 1) P...
1 comment
Read more