Today you will begin learning how to take your passions and expand them beyond yourself, taking responsibility for your life and those around you. You will learn what responsibility is, why you should expand your responsibilities to others, and how to begin the process of taking on more responsibility.
Summary
What is a Responsibility?
In order to take passions and start turning them into a purpose, you will need to move beyond yourself, gaining an understanding of how you fit within the world and what your responsibility is for doing so.
In life, you are responsible for your choices and your actions. You are responsible for what to do, whom to love, and how to suffer.
Responsibility refers to two elements:
To a meaning for whose fulfillment we are responsible (i.e. you are responsible for your own fulfillment),
To a being before whom we are responsible. You not only have a responsibility to yourself, but possibly to your fellow human beings.
Victor Frankl was convinced that the egotist can only benefit from considering others, and conversely, the altruist—for the very sake of the others—must always take care of himself. You can not have one without the other. Therefore, you are responsible for both.
Why should we expand Responsibility beyond ourselves?
The short answer is you're going to find a lot of meaning fulfillment and success in helping others.
The antidote to suffering and benevolence in life is pursuing the highest possible goal.
What is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal? A willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility.
Your life will become meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder because you're genuinely involved in trying to make something better. You're minimizing the suffering of yourself and those around you.
Shouldering responsibility brings a large amount of clarity to your life.
Even when everything else around you seems like it's in chaos, you know that this is the best thing that you could be doing right now. The best way of to be spending your time working towards the highest good that you could imagine.
The world's largest and most complex problems require larger, more comprehensive sacrifices, including your willingness to shoulder the burden of responsibility.
Sometimes when things are not going well, it's not the world that's the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently valued most, both subjectively and personally.
If the world that you're seeing is not the world that you want, it's time to examine your values. And it might even be time for you to sacrifice what you love most. So that you can become the person that you envision doing the highest good. Instead of staying who you are right now.
If you want to alleviate the most suffering from both yourself and other people, you're going to have to make the greatest sacrifices all in the name of this higher good, sacrificing some of your old beliefs and values so that you can become somebody better, somebody that is capable of solving this problem.
You're going to have to sacrifice your time, your resources, your energy, your concentration, on solving this problem.
How to expand your Responsibility?
Before addressing the problems in the world, you must first start with yourself.
How are you going to be able to help others if you can't help yourself first?
Solving your own problems first builds your capacity for responsibility.
Exercise: Examine Your Life
Take time to assess in your own life whether you are truly shouldering your responsibilities, the ones that you have now just unique to you.
Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better?
How have you been complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want?
What are you doing in your life to create the misery that's going on around you?
Imagine if you started correcting the things that you're doing, how much your life could get better and maybe even start improving those around you.
Take actions, even small, towards correcting the wrongs in your own life.
Exercise: Move Up The Levels of Responsibility.
As your capacity for responsibility becomes greater from practice of correcting your own problems, you can begin addressing problems within the communities you and social structures you exist in.
What could you do in your household?
In your neighborhood?
At your job?
In your community?
In your state?
In your nation?
In the world?
At any one of these levels we can take responsibility and find meaning in our lives. Understand your own capacities, your ambitions, and how much meaningful change you could make at any of these levels.
Activity
Start small, analyze your own life, see where you are not taking responsibility for it. Turn those around. Stop doing things that are wrong and and start shouldering the burden of responsibility for the things that you know you could make better in your own life.
Only then should you look beyond yourself, starting with the immediate people you interact with, and how you may be able to help them.
Skill Lesson Mastered
Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have masteredthe knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.
Did You Get Value From This Lesson?
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