500 Words a Week - Reading and Responsibility
“Read what you love until you love to read.” – Naval Ravikant
Developing a reading habit has been great for me trying to better myself, my career and my life. I like to try and have a rotation of 3 books I’m reading. One about something regarding strength and conditioning, another on the topic of personal development of some sort, and the final one being a fiction book.
In school, we receive a lesson and then get a test on the lesson. In life, we get the test and receive the lesson after the test. With reading, we gain knowledge on both the test and lesson.
Relating to Naval’s quote above, I have always enjoyed fantasy books (think Game of Thrones). Books involving a protagonist who faces some form of trial/ tribulation which they must overcome. I believe there is a lot we can take away from books of this nature. Two traits in particular are courage and responsibility. In many fantasy books, the protagonist shoulders the responsibility and possess great amounts of courage to face whatever challenge is laid out before them. Often times they face great odds, or they have been stripped of whatever power they had previously possessed. Regardless of this they take the burden of this responsibility.
I believe in recent times our ability to shoulder responsibility has dwindled. In our working life how often do we see or are we guilty of ourselves not performing tasks because we perceive them as not our responsibility? Despite the fact that we know if the task doesn’t get done there will be negative condonations, with someone potentially getting reprimanded. However, we are happy to let that slide by as we know it won’t be us. In our life outside of work, how often do we let that bill go unpaid, day-day lying on our kitchen counter waiting till we almost forget it before finally paying it.
This is why many of us love superhero movies so much. Similar to above, the protagonist faces a challenge that firstly knocks them down, but through great courage and responsibility comes back to win the challenge. It is even spelled out for us in one of the most famous lines from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”.
If we look a bit deeper at Spiderman, we see that it is Peter Parker’s lack of accepting the burden of responsibility at the beginning of the movie that ultimately ends up getting his uncle killed. After this, with great courage, we see Peter Parker accept the responsibility that has been placed on him, far more than what we would expect from a college student and he then becomes Spiderman.
I have been lucky enough to work with some amazing people and leaders. A common trait I see in all of them is the level of responsibility they carry is far beyond what is expected. This is something that I’m working on myself.
Influenced and inspired by Jordan Peterson.
