It’s Blog Action Day

Today is October 15, 2009 – blog action day.  Today, bloggers from all around the world are blogging about climate change.  You can read all about it at www.blogactionday.org. 

Commitment to taking personal responsibility for your success is one of the keys to career and life success that is part of my Common Sense Success System.  I discuss it in several of my books: Straight Talk for Success, Your Success GPS, and 42 Rules to Jumpstart Your Professional Success. 

If you want to succeed, you must commit to three things.  First, you must take personal responsibility for your success.  Only you can make you a success.  You need to be willing to do the things necessary to succeed.  Second, you must set high goals — and then do whatever it takes to achieve them.   Third, stuff happens; as you go through life you will encounter many problems and setbacks.  You need to react positively to the negative stuff and move forward toward your goals.

On blog action day, I urge everyone to take personal responsibility for doing your part to help with climate change.  Small things can make a big difference in this case.

Here are some of the things that Cathy and I are doing to help ease the problems caused by climate change. 

We’re recycling.  We started recycling about five years when the city of Denver made it easy to do so.  We got our recycling bin and started using it.  We have a lot of paper waste.  We take the daily paper and several periodicals.  I have a home office and print more things that I should.  We drink a lot of bottled water, and a twelve pack of Diet Coke every couple of weeks.  All of these items go into the recycle bin now.  Prior to recycling we filled up two trash cans every week with items we threw away.  Now, because so much of what we were throwing away goes into the recycle bin, we have two or three trash bags that don’t even fill one trash can to the brim.  I was shocked when I first figured out how much recyclable material we were throwing into the trash and was going to the landfill.  Recycling is an easy way to do your part on climate change.

Here are some other things we do now to help the cause…

• We use energy efficient light bulbs.
• We take shorter showers.
• We walk more places.  This one is a win/win – it’s good exercise and it helps with climate change.
• In the summer, I don’t run the AC in my car when I’m in town.  I roll down the windows.
• I shut off my car instead of letting idle if I’m going to be waiting for more than a minute.

None of these things are earth shattering – or very difficult to do.  However, if we all did our part, we could slow down global climate change.  All it takes is a little commitment to making this world a better place.

The common sense point here is simple.  Successful people commit to taking personal responsibility for their lives and their success.  Successful people also commit to taking personal responsibility to making the world a little bit better place.  On this blog action day, I’m asking you to commit to doing one or two small things that can help mitigate global climate change.

That’s my take on personal responsibility and climate change.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud