Why You Need to Take Responsibility for Your Life
It makes sense and has many benefits
It’s important to take responsibility for what happens in your life. Although this idea is almost a cliche, it’s worth emphasizing because it’s so important.
But what does it mean to take responsibility? In my mind, it means when you encounter a problem in your life, you expect yourself to come up with a solution. It means when something goes wrong in your life, you focus on the aspects of the problem that you can change and there’s almost always something you can change.
There are at least four important reasons to take responsibility for your life: self knowledge, the limitations of other people, self-interest and the power self-efficacy.
Self Knowledge
The first reason is self knowledge: you are often the best person for solving your problems simply because you understand yourself better than anyone else does.
You are the only person who has observed 100% of the actions that has been done by you or to you in your life. This is also true for the parents of young children but the percentage rapidly drops as the child grows older.
However, even if someone knew every moment of your life, it wouldn’t be enough to understand you as well as you do because in addition to external events, you have access to your internal subjective view. Although our knowledge of the internal workings of our minds is limited, it is usually substantially more than other people have. And your self-knowledge could be expanded further with practices such as meditation and reflection.
Since you have significantly more knowledge of you than anyone else, you understand your values, problems and life experiences far better than anyone else despite the fact that your self-knowledge may seem limited. The reality is that your self-understanding is the best in the world. Of course, it is often helpful to talk to other people but since we cannot share our internal experiences directly, the words we use to describe our lives are always merely correlates to our true internal experiences. When we talk to someone else, a significant fraction of information we are trying to convey is lost or even misinterpreted. Many arguments arise from mutual misunderstandings rather than actual differences in beliefs between two people. Sometimes when we are talking to someone else we aren’t really communicating but merely clarifying our thoughts to ourselves. These problems highlight the importance of effective communication but communication has its limits no matter how effective it is.
Limitations of Other People
The second reason why we need to develop the capacity to take responsibility for our lives is that the ability of other people to help us with our lives is naturally limited. Most other people cannot help you much because they have limited time and cognitive capacity and even if they could they may not have a strong incentive to do so.
First of all, the amount of time available to everyone is limited. For example, let’s say you’re working 8 hours per day with several co-workers. Because they are busy, they might only have one or two hours to spend helping other people and they may have to divide that time among several people. In practice, what often ends up happening is that you have to figure out problems on your own. The same problem applies to many different types of relationships: friends with multiple friends, parents with multiple children, teachers with many students, politicians with many voters and so on. So one reason why the amount of help you can receive is limited is because other people’s time is limited.
We also have limited cognitive capacity. There’s a special number called Dunbar’s number which states that people can form up to 150 stable relationships with other people. Since there are billions of people in the world, we can imagine millions of these tiny Dunbar groups like little circles dotted all over the planet. The people in each circle know, understand and think about the other people in their circle but much less about people outside it.
Think of the countless millions of people across the world who are complete strangers to you. Even in your own country or city, most of the people there are complete strangers. There are so many people out there that it’s impossible to comprehend all their lives individually which limits our ability to help others and limits their ability to help us.
Self Interest
Self interest is another important reason why it is important to take responsibility for your life. With the exception of your close relationships such as family and close friends, most people care a lot more about themselves than you and do not have a strong incentive to help you.
Many of us live our lives as if we were the protagonist of a movie. The world revolves around us and our concerns have the highest priority. But this is an illusion as everyone else is thinking in a similar way. To most other people, you are little more than an extra in their personal movie that doesn’t get much attention. There’s this cognitive bias called the spotlight effect where we tend to overestimate how much other people notice the things we do. It’s as if we believe there’s a spotlight shining on us and everyone else is watching. But of course, everyone is thinking in a similar way. In reality, most other people are thinking very little about you. A useful exercise to appreciate this is to think of a random person you know and then ask yourself how often you think about them. You’ll probably find that you hardly ever think about them. The Pareto principle probably applies here: most of your time and attention probably goes to the few people you know best and very little goes to everyone else.
Self Efficacy
Taking responsibility for your life increases self-efficacy and self-efficacy has many benefits.
Self-efficacy is a psychological term that describes peoples’ belief in their ability to complete tasks and how much influence they have over their life outcomes. One of the core differences between those with high and low self-efficacy is where they perceive their locus of control to be. People with high self-efficacy tend to have an internal locus of control instead of an external locus of control and a greater sense of control over their lives. For example, a student with high self-efficacy would focus on the amount of study they did or how hard they worked. Another with low self-efficacy will be more likely to attribute success or failure to uncontrollable or external factors such as talent or teaching standards.
People high in self-efficacy tend to have a strong sense of self-responsibility and control over their lives. They believe in themselves and they see challenges as opportunities rather than threats. When something goes wrong, they tend to see the source of the problem as internal; a lack of effort rather than a fixed character flaw or an external cause that they can’t control.
There are many benefits to high levels of self-efficacy such as better work performance, better health and a lower risk of depression.
Conclusion
It’s clear that most people can’t help you much because of limited knowledge, time, awareness and interest. But there is at least one person who scores highly on all these traits: you. You have a more knowledge of yourself than anyone else, you can devote much of your time to yourself, you have the best knowledge of yourself in the world and you care about what happens to you.
Because of these advantages, you are probably the person most effective at helping you, solving your problems and improving your life.
There is also a psychological basis for taking responsibility for your life: people with high levels of self-efficacy have better outcomes at work and better physical and mental health.
So take responsibility for your life.
