Responsibility is the core principle from which all self-improvement activities flow, and self-improvement is the key to success.

You cannot change the world, but you can change yourself. Before you can change yourself, you have to believe that you are in control of yourself and that the reasons for your current circumstances are due to your own choices. Without that belief, you will not find motivation to strive for long-term change.

In Japanese, the word tsutomeru means “to strive, to endeavor, to make an effort.” All managers struggle. But only good managers strive. At first, before we earn enough trust from our own bosses to be given the responsibility of managing other people’s work, we believe that we are struggling with forces outside of us. We believe we are struggling with the environment.

It must be that they do not like men or women, that they find us to be the wrong race, that they have a secret fraternity that we are not members are. They must have some hidden resentment against us. They are afraid of our ideas and creativity. They are threatened by our superior intelligence.

This mysterious “they” refers to management - everyone including our boss who is a member of that magic group of people one level up from where we are. They are “The Man.” And they are keeping us down. They must be, because we are not being given the positions of authority and power for which we are so obviously destined. They make those decisions, not us.

Few are the people who are willing to look in the mirror and drop blame where it truly belongs: upon one’s own shoulders. We are not amazingly intelligent and wise people who threaten the establishment. No, that is not the case at all. In fact, quite the opposite is true. We are neck-deep in a game - the rules of which we do not understand and have not even thought to investigate.

努める(P); 勉める; 力める 【つとめる】 (v1,vt) to endeavor (endeavour); to try; to strive; to make an effort; to exert oneself; to be diligent;

Very few people are willing to take the first, most important evolutionary step that will allow them to crawl out of the ocean and onto the beach and breath air like the first fish which dared challenge the land. That first step is responsibility - the acceptance of blame for one’s troubles.

The day we realize that we are not unsuccessful because some invisible network of highly placed executives sitting in secret meetings of the Trilateral Commission plotting our demise but rather because of our own lack of judgment and poor choices Stephen Covey would call a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shift?

How about epiphany? That moment when it suddenly dawns on you that you are not dressed for success and that other people, fair or not, judge you by your appearance - that seems more like an epiphany than a paradigm shift. The day that you realize that from your boss’s perspective, your desk is a black box where things go in and never come out is also an epiphany. Once you have that moment, you are never the same again, and you can never quite blame the world for your troubles as you once could.

That is the moment when The Struggle begins - when you change from someone who feels hopeless and afraid to try to someone who takes up the fight in earnest, a step at a time, to defeat the real enemy - the enemy within.

To go to war against your own demons and attempt to seize control of your own mind is the longest, most complicated and difficult project there is. It is also the most powerful and rewarding. Ask around and speak to people who have been through experiences of personal transformation accomplished through acts of pure willpower and self-discipline. Among their stories you will find one element in common: the battles may be continuous, never-ending, uphill, and brutal, but with each inch of ground taken comes increased self-awareness and new understanding that our previous viewpoint was backwards.

The world is not holding us down. We are holding us down. The world is not filled with enemies.  The world is filled with potential allies that we are driving away.

Responsibility is the beginning of real maturity - of understanding. Before we can take control over our own destiny, we must believe that can take control, and we must understand that we cannot control others. Whatever our dreams may be, we must join the ranks of those who look in the mirror and see themselves as responsible for their own circumstances, or we will forever be struggling against an imaginary, non-existent enemy as if spinning our wheels on ice.

Everyone struggles, but only a few strive. Only a small percentage of people ever become self-aware, self-disciplined, and determined to change in large enough measure to make the switch from fighting the world to striving every day to change and behave in particular ways.

Responsibility is the key to everything that follows.

This concept is found in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Read it.