Taking responsibility | Hacker News Reader

Taking responsibility

swombat.com

Which brings me to the final point of this article, one which most of the self-help books out there fail to cover: taking responsibility, getting involved, throwing yourself into the thick of things and making decisions

Personally, I'm thankful most self-help book don't do this. The last thing the world needs is self-help book addicts who have a mandate to insert themselves in peoples' lives more. But then again, I don't think they would be self-help books anymore if they did this. They'd be other-help books, which is a very interesting idea indeed.

This is a very well written piece of article. But I also believe that we cannot control everything that happens. It's OK to sometimes lose control and go with the flow. It might lead to newer horizons. Having said that, it's a call of the person and the situation. Going with intuition is perhaps the best solution in such circumstances.

At the London Hackspace, there's a saying that gets used a lot. When someone has describes a great idea for improving the space, some excellent idea for how to categorize the book sin the library or whatever, the stock response is "Great! Well volunteered!". It's to the point that there have been posts to the mailing list consisting of only the letters "wv".

And that's an excellent way to think, and I find it seeping into the rest of my life. If you decide something should be done, the vast majority of the time, if you put effort into it, if you take responsibility for it, it can be done. There's not many bars to achievement once you decide to do that. In a startup environment, there are so many things that need solving, that are crying out for people to take responsibility for them. The only way they'll get done is if you decide it's you that'll do them, not if you assign them elsewhere.

Atlas shrugged.

This was great and very motivating but my only little squabble with it was where he talked about excuses. I'm one who firmly believes that there is no room for excuses I'm anything you do but when you fail and try to point out why, that isn't always an excuse. We need to try to understand everything as humans and sometimes our theories on why we fail are off base and can sound like excuses. Some things are just out of our control. Those who are making excuses know it deep down inside but sometimes you fail and you really jus can't control it.

    we let the decisions be taken by the faceless system of default behaviours that composes the world.

I love that line. Not sure why but it really got to me.

    The default outcome for life in the western world is being normal, unremarkable, unnoticeable.

This one got to me more. So well put. So many people who want to cry about life not being fair and things not going how they want and it's because they accept the default. I find myself having to tell people something similar though far less eloquent all the time.

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