Importance Of Punctuality And Responsibility

Punctuality and responsibility are two very important character traits that will help you strive in not only your Army career but also in life. In this short essay I will describe both traits and their respective importance.
First to be covered in this short essay is responsibility, or being responsible and its importance to your career. The most relevant definition of being responsible, in the sense of this essay, is as follows: “able to answer for one's conduct and obligations”, this definition is from Merriam Webster’s dictionary. The importance of this is that you need to be able to answer for how you act or behave and also need to have an account of your obligations. The conduct in question is my being late to Physical Training and the …show more content…
When the family friends went on vacation they tasked me with the responsibility of taking care of their dogs and their house. This was the first point in my life where I had actual responsibility of something other than what I ate or wore to school .It was a daunting task at first not knowing what to expect. They gave me some instructions on how to properly care for their dogs while they were away, granted it may have only been 3 days that they were gone but they trusted me with the well-being of their family members. I knew that I had to take care of their dogs as if they were my own. I had to make sure that I fed them on time, let them out when they needed to use the bathroom, take them on walks and make sure they were put away in their cages at night. Needless to say I succeeded in this task for all three days. After this they then trusted me and asked if I could take care of their dogs for longer periods of times while they were gone. The story of maintaining responsibility is only a small scale example of how far being responsible can take you. It can define how people receive you as a person and it lets people trust you with larger tasks if they see you can maintain simple …show more content…
Being punctual is defined as: “being on time”, provided by Merriam Webster’s dictionary. Being on time is important in anything that you do, this is what everyone sees you by. When you are not on time consistently people begin to judge your other character traits. As stated by famous American novelist Charles Dickens: ‘I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.” This proving that punctuality will get you far. It will assure that you achieve all your tasks on time and in a well-mannered fashion if there is a set timeline for the said tasks. A key example of what poor punctuality looks like in our unit is also embodied by Fields. Fields was on his way to make Specialist by the time he ETS’d however, due to his inability to show up on time he was recommended for an article 15 thus making him ineligible for promotion. Another example of punctuality would be in a war time situation. If a Soldier were on a quick reaction force team as a helicopter pilot but said soldier was not on time he would be unable to get the helicopter to the soldiers who needed extraction on time thus possibly resulting in more casualties than required in that