How to be a responsible person: Introduction

Sometimes ago, I shared a post titled "大事由小事做起" ("To do great things, you have to do the little things well first") written by 黃毅力 because I really agreed with what he said. In particular, I think that it's very important for a person to be "有交帶".

Due to my poor English, I really can't think of a single word to describe what "有交帶" means. I can explain the term with a sentence though:

Follow up on things that one is responsible for and make sure that they get done

"Well, can't you just use the word responsible?"

The thing is, what I described is just one trait of a responsible person. For example, a responsible person will also admit his/her own mistakes openly.

Out of curiosity, I did a search on Google with the keywords "how to be a responsible person". Guess what I've found?

The first result is a page of the site goodcharacter.com. It is one of the "Life Skills" topic for grades K-5 kids there.

The second result is the legal definition of a responsible person, which has something to do with IRS and isn't really related to what I'm talking about here.

The third result is a social story for children with autism, which belongs to a class of tools that can be easily understood by them for the purpose of learning various social skills.

Wow, these results really surprise me.

Honestly, I think that many adults in this world need to learn how to be a responsible person. The lack of webpages targeted for adults probably imply that we are all supposed to learn to be a responsible person when we're kids. From my observation, however, many people fail to do that and that's why we have a lot of irresponsible adults in this world.

I'm not sure what your definition of a "successful person" is. If I am to define it, I'd say a person is successful if s/he

• brings great value to this world
• has a happy family

You may also want to say "famous, "is respected by his/her peers" or "financially independent" but I realize that if you bring great value to this world, you WILL BE famous, respected by your peers and financially independent.

Although I dare not say that I'm a successful person, I'm deeply convinced that being responsible is a necessary (although not sufficient) factor to be successful.

Because of this, I've decided to write a series of posts about how one can be a responsible person. If you don't care about being successful, just ignore what I write. If you do care, however, I hope that you will find my posts useful :)

• How to be a responsible person: Definitions
• How to be a responsible person: Just say NO
• How to be a responsible person: Cut unused communication channels
• How to be a responsible person: Use a calendar
• How to be a responsible person: RSVP properly