Look at the word: Response-Ability. You are responsible, to some degree, for everything that you have any control over. You have major responsibility to take care of yourself and we share a portion of the responsibility to care for those around us and our world. Keeping this in mind will help you make good decisions.
Understanding responsibility also helps you to avoid wasting time feeling bad when you are not to blame. Realize that if you have no control over something negative, you might be sad but you should not feel guilty or responsible. Be honest with yourself.
Of course, you are guilty of something, don’t dwell on it to the point that you make it more likely to recur. Get on with your life and do what you can to improve the situation or the present and future. You will more than likely encounter those who believe that you should guilty and ashamed, but if you have learned and changed, I hope you will choose to disregard them and help eliminate this sick belief from our culture.
Please be selfish. Seek good things for yourself and offer no excuses when you get them.
But also be wise!! Don’t seek things that are not good for you, that won’t help you live a healthy, productive, happy life.
Also, be generous!! If you are wise, you will choose to be both selfish and generous. This is based on the idea of abundance—competition somehow got everyone thinking that there’s not enough to go around, and that when one person wins, others must lose or suffer in some way. The opposite is true. The more you have, the more you can give. The more money you make, the healthier the economy will be. The more you learn and grow, the more you will enlighten those around you. The better you develop your talents, the more others can enjoy them with you if you are generous.
If more of us accepted complete responsibility for ourselves and a degree of responsibility for our environment (including everything we have put in it), solutions for all our problems would eventually appear. We need more such role models.