Thunderbolts I’ve Appreciated
I can point to two definitive instances when I had a revelation about my personal responsibility.
The first happened when I was about seven or eight years old. It was a realization that someone had been taking care of me. Before that point, I had the care-free existence that most children get to have, where everything just was. The neighbourhood was my entire world. There was no responsibility, no future to concern me and no basic needs to fulfill. Someone else, namely my parents, took complete responsibility for my welfare.
That was a long time ago and I was a little kid, but I still remember the loss I felt. I knew then that one day I was going to have to take responsibility. I was soon resigned to this new future, but I remember wishing I just hadn’t figured it out for a few more years.
What followed was a few decades of slow, incremental growth of responsibility. I went from being a child to being a kid with desires to grow. I went from being a straight-A student to being a young adult that wanted to be successful in the world. I got into management roles and areas of responsibility with work that I thought were impressive. I kept a mental note of who were at the same “level” as me. I should always be the youngest, I thought. I thought that was a good measure of my ability and my success. It was this pattern that also started to create dissonance for me. I saw that this was a path that would keep going for my entire career. Then, as the saying goes, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
I found myself at a leadership training course in 2005 with a man that would become my personal coach. He said leadership was “down and in before up and out.” This idea, as well as many of the practical concepts he shared that day, created the second significant revelation for me. I saw that not only was I responsible to care for myself (my epiphany as an eight-year-old), but I was also personally responsible for the way I responded to events and the way I acted. I wasn’t just there to know the answer and implement it. As an intelligent and responsible person, I could… should… decide what was the right and effective thing to do. A subtle distinction, perhaps, but it shifted me from my basic responsibility to be a proficient and market-valuable person to a responsibility to be a thoughtful and participating member of humanity.
I see now there is an entire industry of people trying to help others make this leap. The personal responsibility revelation market. If I could bottle my experience and put it on a shelf, I could be a millionaire. Alas, it appears that the revelation is destined to remain in the domain of psyches and souls of individuals. It’s a personal journey. No-one else takes you there. Having people talk about it and share their experience helps though, so I’ll keep talking about it.
I was re-reading Seth Godin’s Tribes and came across this:
It’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. For seven, ten, or even fifiteen years of school, you are required to not be curious. Over and over and over again, the curious are punished.
I don’t think it’s a matter of saying a magic word; boom and then suddenly something happens and you’re curious. It’s more about a five- or ten- or fifteen year process where you start finding your voice, and finally you bigin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risk and the riskies thing you can do is play it safe.
