Responsibility My Education on Responsibility

¶ … Responsibility

My education on responsibility is best measured by mile markers throughout my life that parallel other equally important events and insights. The lessons learned from early friendships and the necessity of give and take, of being more focused on a friend's needs than my own, taught me responsibility in making and keeping friends. Fortunate enough to have lived in one location for my entire childhood, I was able through trial and error in early friendships learn what it meant to be a true friend, to act responsibly and in essence, to turn into someone trustworthy of my friends. The responsibility of telling the truth and being honest was one of my first lessons learned, and while it was painful to be caught in lies and deception of my early friends about a sleep-over where I invited only the more popular friends over and greatly hurt my other friends, I realized the fact that to act responsibly to your friends to be considerate to them and put them all in the center of your plans. The responsibility of appreciating them all, no matter how popular they were or not, was a good lessoned learned. I nearly lost my other friends over that, and it was a powerful lesson about being responsible to others who consider you their best friend.

The responsibility of not cheating or more specifically, taking short-cuts on jobs I was hired to do also happened when I was in elementary school. I was hired by a friend of my parents to distribute flyers throughout the neighborhood to promote their new restaurant. My friend and I put a series of flyers in every mail box we could find, even on the windshields of cars, and under the doormats of houses. We thought we were doing an excellent job of serving the new business owners by putting flyers literally anywhere we could think of, at each and every house on our block. After just one street we had passed out over 500 flyers! We felt proud until the restaurants' owners (my parents' friends) came over and said they had received several complaints about excessive use of flyers and advertisements. My parents' friends said that some had received over five fliers! My friend and I were very embarrassed and apologized, explaining that we thought we had done an excellent job. Being in the 4th grade we had mistaken pure activity with results, and despite having to clean up the over-enthusiastic distribution of fliers and even take a cut in pay for the total job, my friend and I learned the responsibility of doing a thorough job that is honestly executed.

Next came the responsibility of competition, and while playing Little League and later high school football, the responsibility of teamwork came to life for me. When everyone who first enters a sport thinks of being a superstar and soaring above everyone with hitting a home run at the critical point in a game, scoring the winning basket in a basketball game, or catching a touchdown pass, in reality only through coordinated and extensive teamwork do accomplishments happen, especially in teams of neophytes, like we were.

After all the illusions of instant superstardom subside, the need for and even the dependence on team support sets in. The realization hit me one game that I was nothing without my team, and that my best days in baseball were when I gave my team my best, and contributed to us moving forward. Sure, I wanted to always hit a home run when I went to the plate, but I realized that just connecting with the ball and getting a base hit, even aiming to get the ball down and bunt to advance runners even if I was thrown out, was better than striking out trying to hit home runs. I learned the responsibility of being focused on my team first, and my responsibility to stay in good shape, stay healthy and most of all, stay focused while playing in the infield. So many management writers today write about when things are going well, team dynamics kick in and everyone on the team is "loose" and "going with the follow." Yet it's been my experience that even in the midst of a losing season, that when a team collectively feels this responsibility to each other, there is still hope of winning. When everyone has a responsibility of performance to each other, even when our team was struggling and trying to get a win, the responsibility of teamwork to each other kept the team dynamics positive. That responsibility to a team still is very strong in me today; and I still feel the responsibility to a team and honestly get mad if I see others who are not giving their total effort to a team.