Personal Success

Michael Korda, editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster once said "Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility" (Quotes on Responsibility). Personal responsibility can be defined as taking responsibility for one’s actions, including accepting the consequences of those actions. Responsibility is important to all learning and developing (Turning Teaching Into Learning: The Role of Student Responsibility in the Collegiate Experience ). Many factors contribute to a person’s eventual success in college. However, the student has a personal responsibility for his or her success. While families and instructors have some effect on a person’s success, each individual is personally responsible in his or her achievement in college.

One way to look at personal responsibility is to see it as responding wisely to opportunities and challenges (Downing, 2011). Persons with personal responsibility do not wait for other things, such as people or luck, to make choices for them. An important part of personal responsibility is choice. Accepting personal responsibility in one’s life means he or she takes control of the decisions in his or her life. One example is studying for a test. A student who has assumed personal responsibility will create a time schedule and study for the upcoming test. A student who has not accepted personal responsibility will not study for the test. That student will hope that he or she will be lucky and still get a good grade. In a person’s life, he or she can be one of two things when it comes to personal responsibility. A person can be either a “creator” or a “victim.” A creator accepts that things are not working one way and will change them to gain success. A victim will not accept when things are not working and will continue doing the same things. A victim will be the person making excuses for his...