irrefutable.
Virtually all highly successful people—from
CEOs to professional athletes to the President of the United
States—embrace a high degree of accountability. It gives
them the leverage they need to take action and create
results, even when they don’t feel like it. Without it, we’d
have a lot more pro-athletes skipping practice,
and CEOs
spending their days playing
Words With Friends
TM
on their
iPhones. I’m sure some are already doing that (I’m guilty of
it occasionally), but we’d have a lot more.
Accountability is the act of being responsible to
someone else for some action or result. Very little happens
in
this world, or in your life, without some form of
accountability. Virtually every positive result you and I
produced from birth to age eighteen was thanks to the
accountability provided for us by the adults in our lives
(parents,
teachers, bosses, etc.) Vegetables got eaten,
homework was completed, teeth were brushed, we bathed
and got to bed at a reasonable hour. If it weren’t for the
accountability provided for us by
our parents and teachers,
we would have been uneducated, malnourished, sleep-
deprived, dirty little kids! Nice way to reframe it, right?
Accountability has brought order to our lives and
allowed
us to progress, improve and achieve results we
wouldn’t
have
otherwise.
Here’s
the
problem:
accountability was never something you and I asked for, but
rather something that we endured as children, teens, and
young adults. As it was forced upon us by adults, most of us
unconsciously grew to resist and resent accountability
altogether. Then, when we turned 18, we embraced every
ounce of freedom
we could get our hands on, continuing to
avoid accountability like it was the plague, perpetuating a
downward spiral into mediocrity, developing detrimental
mindsets and
habits such as laziness, deflecting
responsibility, and taking short cuts—hardly a recipe for
success.
Now that
we are all grown up and striving to achieve
worthy levels of success and fulfillment, we must take
responsibility for initiating
our own systems for
accountability (or move back in with our parents). Your
accountability system could be a professional coach,
mentor, even a good friend or family member. The reality is
that, statistically, 95% of the people that read any book
don’t implement what they learn,
because no one is holding
them accountable to do so. There is a way to change that.
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