Take Responsibility for What Needs to Happens Next 🎯 🔄 💡

Everybody loves a rainbow; considerably fewer of us want the weather that comes with it. As your mother probably told you, life requires taking the good with the bad. Rain and rainbows tend to travel together.

In my experience, living and acting responsibly doesn't guarantee success. We can make good choices, work hard, and give our best effort and still encounter setbacks. That's where responsibility reaches maturity. You cannot take responsibility for everything that happens, but you can take responsibility for what you do next. When the rain inevitably comes, don't surrender what you're working toward. Take a step back, think logically, and adjust your thinking and actions.

I've often told the story here about my 15-year quest to develop a paperless HR environment; what I often leave out is the nearly disastrous part of the project we attempted for the opening of Treasure Island.

It started after The Mirage opened, when we debriefed our efforts around recruiting, hiring, and onboarding 5,500 new employees from the more than 55,000 people who applied. We had been so awash in paper that I became determined to find a way to use technology, then still in its infancy, to make the process more efficient.

For the opening of Treasure Island in 1993, I wanted to convert application forms and other new-hire documents into rudimentary databases that managers could access and review electronically. We considered converting those documents into digital text, but optical character recognition (OCR) software was still too new and unreliable. Instead, we decided to scan the original documents into a database and allow managers to review what were essentially electronic copies of the paper forms.

Long story short, the forms containing handwritten information were mostly illegible. Even scanned driver's licenses were often too dark to read. In the end, we went right back to using paper to collect documents that had to be handled, filed, tracked, and processed manually. The paperless project appeared dead.

That's how projects big and small get stalled or cancelled. It's the rain that falls before the rainbow appears.

But by 1995, technology was progressing, and IT executives had become interested in and responsive to my ideas. Even though the concept had been criticized and, in some cases, ridiculed, I never gave up on it. Anyone committed to bringing new ideas to life must learn patience and perseverance. Those virtues are essential companions to responsibility.

We all have dreams. Responsible people don't abandon them at the first sign of difficulty. They adapt, learn, regroup, and keep moving forward.

Even if you have to hunker down in a storm while pursuing your goals, don't let obstacles and challenges cancel them. Keep pushing forward until you find the answers and the rainbow waiting on the other side. Starting today.

Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean (née Parton; January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026) was an American singer-songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman. Dubbed the "Queen of Country", Parton was one of the most successful performers in the history of country music.