Books about taking responsibility

December 29, 2015 12:17 PM

This is a narrower question than the title might suggest. A search for books about taking responsibility on Amazon returns the following relevant results:

Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, Nathaniel Branden

Stepping Up: How Taking Responsibility Changes Everything, John Izzo

Grow Up: How Taking Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult, Frank Pittman

Was wondering if anyone has read and can recommend or not recommend any of these titles?

posted by ionnin to Education (4 answers total)

Best answer: since no-one has answered, and i thought this looked interesting, i hope it's ok for me to comment based on online reviews.

branden's book appears to be the most scholarly and serious (and focussed on wider issues than the reader's own experience).

izzo's book is more like a classic self help - he has concepts like the responsibility ripple.

pittman's likely falls between the two. this seems like an edited excerpt, for example.

so if you like (cheesy?) popular self-help, go with izzo. if you're more into an academic overview, try branden. otherwise, pittman.
posted by andrewcooke at 2:23 PM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Just a heads up - Nathaniel Branden is a disciple of Ayn Rand, so if you're not into Objectivism, that one might not be a good choice. I hear his non-fiction is a lot easier to read than her fiction, though, so if you are interested (I don't recommend it but) this might be a good way to look into it. I will say that I haven't read this specific book though - just have had experience with other Objectivist works and with people who came to my only-3-readers blog once I posted something about not being into it to argue me into accepting Rand as my atheist savior. So. Make of that what you will.

Are you looking for more philosophical works, or more self-help? Or both? That might help us give you better feedback.
posted by dust.wind.dude at 2:27 PM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: More self-helpy, but I didn't want to ask for recommendations, because that would be redundant of many dozens of prior questions.
posted by ionnin at 4:41 PM on December 29, 2015

Well, that may be another point against Branden then. I think you may be running into more of a search terms problem if that's all you turned up on Amazon - this may be a silly/obvious question, but did you try just "responsibility" and then sifting through the results/filtering down through the categories? other forms of the word like "responsible"? other synonyms (I'm drawing a blank at the moment on what specifically might be best, maybe things like "duty")? I feel like there should be a LOT more out there than just these three.

Hmm. Going in a self-help direction, you might want to check out things in the field of recovering from addiction or codependent relationships (or even Borderline Personality Disorder) - some of the psychological aspects of those kinds of treatments have to do with learning to take responsibility for yourself. You might even, depending on what you're hoping to accomplish, find ADHD help books useful, though those tend to be more in the practical tips sense because of the nature of the condition (in my experience with ADHD there's not really anything wrong with your desire/sense of responsibility, it's more that the execution of it can be tricky, whereas BPD and codependency as I understand them can lean more toward troubles on the "sense of" side).

Trying to aim away from repeating previous Asks for you, so not giving book recs. I love the feeling of figuring out something for yourself, so I'm really digging looking at this from a "helping you figure out how to search to get what you want" angle :) I hope this helps!
posted by dust.wind.dude at 12:56 PM on December 30, 2015