Freedom and responsibility




Recently I have some thoughts regarding freedom and responsibility. Responsibility is something which we respond to or take care of. Freedom is the ability to act as regards of our will. Oftenly when we get some sorts of responsibility we have to act as not as we would will. For example, a husband and father should take care of the family and "final-responsible" for the family well-being and prosperity. In most of the world's cultures he has to provide enough money for wife and children (sometimes also his parents). It is a quite a big pressure and can be situation "I don't want to, but I should". Another example comes from the work place: I have met many people, who responded on my question: "Do you like your work?" something like rhetorically "OMG, it is a work, how can you like it?". It leads to the situation when we take the responsibility, which actually condtradicts to the will. So it is a truth to say that for most of the people, responsibility limits the freedom.
being responsible for what/ whom you love
For that case I remember one friend of mine, formerly a senior executive from Samsung, has said: "In the life it is 70% you have to do of what you actually do not want to do". However there is a distinction between being responsible for what you want and do things, what you want. For example, I want to become a CEO of General Electric (just an example, no such an ambition so far). It is about taking care of more than 300,000 employees and operations in over 140 countries. As a CEO, sometimes I will need to make a decision about such a thing as employee firing. It is definitely is not a fun, people are being hurt, their families as well. But if I am resposible for the whole company well-being and profitability, I want the company to be successful. So I have to do this (or might fail and board of directors will fire me). Once during the semiconductor conference I met top-level executive from one of the largest Chinese semiconductor manufacturers. Now he is retired and teaching at Peking University. Through our discussion he said: "It is definitely not a fun thing when 7 000 employees are waiting for your decision".
sometimes our responsibility can make us feel uneasy
I believe that in the end happines comes from doing what we want/ love to do and by being responsible for what we want to be responsible. We have a freedom to choose for what we want to be responsible and then choose the way or method how we respond to it, how take care of it. So it is important to make sure we want this responsibility to be responsible for. Then we must make clear what we want to do with this responsibility: where our family should be in one..five years, a company, me personally? After this we choose the best method and with discipline should execute it. The last part is probably the hardest one, because there is no ideal methodology "do all I want", when we are dealing with other people and with personal will. 

In the end I would remind what Collin Powel once said: "Even if you do not really like what you are doing, but you know you have to do it, find some part of it, which you like. And focus on it". I do not advocate doing thing which we 100% do not like. If there is such a case - it is better to find another responsibility. From another side: too much of one thing is not good. We do not need too much freedom in order to be happy, because:
Only by doing things we can be happy.  (c)  Pierre Mauriaud
                                                               


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