response-ability

Accountability breeds response-ability. Commitment and involvement produce change. In training executives, we use a step-by-step, natural, progressive, sequential approach to change. In fact, we encourage executives to set goals and make commitments up front; teach and apply the material regularly; and report their progress to each other. 

If you want to overcome the pull of the past - those powerful restraining forces of habit, custom, and culture - to bring about desired change, count the costs and rally the necessary resources. In the space program, we see that tremendous thrust is needed to clear the powerful pull of the earth's gravity. So it is with breaking old habits.

Breaking deeply embedded habits - such as procrastinating, criticizing, overeating, or oversleeping - involves more than a little wishing and willpower. Often our own resolve is not enough. We need reinforcing relationships - people and programs that hold us accountable and responsible. 

Remember: Response-ability is the ability to choose our response to any circumstance or condition. When we are response-able, our commitment becomes more powerful than our moods or circumstances, and we keep the promises and resolutions we make. 

Stephen R. Covey

Principle-Centered Leadership. 2009/ RosettaBooks. 

their music still in them

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.  -  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.  -  Tagore


As quoted in The Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball. 1969. p.16

a lot of empty yesterdays

You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you’ve collected a lot of empty yesterdays.

Professor Harold Hill, character in The Music Man (1957) by Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey, as quoted in Thomas S. Monson, “Finding Joy in the Journey,” Ensign, Nov 2008, 84–87

the job that's never started

It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.


J. R. R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring (Sam remembering the Gaffer). George Allen. 1954