One thing to look for when hiring is whether a person internalizes or externalizes responsibility for things. Imagine you run a fast-food restaurant. Compare these two situations: * Team member shows up 15 minutes late, without notice. When asked about it, they say that the traffic was really bad on their route and they didn't hear their alarm. When you ask them to prevent it for future, they say that they can't control the traffic and they'll try to fix their alarm. * Team member gives the team and anyone who needs to know a 30-minute warning that they'll be 15-25 minutes late. When they arrive, they go to their manager, they note that they messed up and left their phone in another room and didn't hear their alarm and then they failed to account for traffic at the adjusted time. "I messed up, I've added a backup alarm clock, and I've added a reminder to my phone to check the traffic after I wake up so that I can adjust my timing to it." Which team member do you expect other people will prefer to work with, and will improve at the role over time? Obviously the second one. Related: * Tony Robbins talks about the benefit of being "responsible" for things - if you are responsible, he says that you are "response-able" - you have the power to change the situation. If you don't have responsibility, then you also don't have power to change it. * The book "Feeling Good Together" did a study on couples and found that only two variables predicted happy marriages. 1) The degree to which each person wanted to make the other person happy and 2) The degree to which each person tended to blame other people for things vs take self responsibility for things. * Delian and Keith Rabois talk about the ownership mentality in this post on [executive hiring](https://delian.io/lessons-2). ### Responsibility vs blame * Other-blame: It's their fault, they're bad. * Self-blame: It's my fault, I'm bad. * Self-responsibility: It's my fault, I can fix it. Self-responsibility is what you want. Take responsibility, without the negativity. It was a mistake, you accept that it happened, you can't change the past, you regulate your emotions and take some deep breaths, and now you want to fix anything remaining about it for the present, and you want to make it better or less likely for the future. ### Good formula for communicating mistakes If it's before you've committed/submitted/published the work and you can fix it with no consequences, then this doesn't apply. This is about mistakes that did or could've had some consequence somewhere. 1. Admit the mistake as soon as you realize 2. Note what happened 3. Note how it's going to be fixed (note that this is future tense - speed of notifying about a mistake with consequences is important, so generally you should be notifying before it's fixed) 4. Note how recurrence or similar mistakes will be prevented in the future