Meta: Heroic responsibility is a standard concept on LessWrong. I was surprised to find that we don't have a post explaining it to people not already deep in the cultural context, so I wrote this one.

Suppose I decide to start a business - specifically a car dealership.

One day there's a problem: we sold a car with a bad thingamabob. The customer calls up the sales department, which hands it off to the legal department, which hands it off to the garage, which can't find a replacement part so they hand it back to the legal department, which then hands it back off to the finance department, which goes back to the garage. It's a big ol' hot potato. It's not really any specific person's job to handle this sort of problem, and nobody wants to deal with it.

One of the earliest lessons of entrepreneurship is: as the business owner/manager, this sort of thing is my job. When it's not any other specific person's job, it's mine. Because if it doesn't get done, it's my business which will lose money. I can delegate it, I can make it somebody else' job, but I'm still the one [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.