The Power of Accountability

Hey friends,

Accountability is a powerful thing. Making a commitment to doing something and then holding ourselves accountable to others is one of the most useful tools in our motivation and productivity arsenals.

Without accountability, there’s absolutely no way I would’ve written a mini blog post in the form of these email newsletters for the past 70 weeks. And without accountability there’s certainly no way I would be up at 1am (having just driven 2 hours to get home from a friends wedding, with work early the following morning and wanting nothing better than to sink into my bed and sleep) to write and send this email.

Accountability is also a core component of the online writing course that I enrolled in this week. It’s an 8-week programme that teaches students how to write and publish valuable content on the internet. There are 2 forms of accountability in the course. Firstly, it requires students to create their own weekly email newsletters to share our writing to. And secondly it brings students together in small groups to critique each other’s work. The course instructor David recognises that even though the cohort of students are paying a lot of money to take part, and are probably very motivated to improve our writing, we still need these accountability ‘hacks’ to force us to actually take action.

So if you’re trying to do anything that benefits from consistency (as most things do) and you’re struggling with finding the motivation to keep going, consider hacking your environment to increase your accountability. You could easily do that by tweeting updates, or starting your own free email newsletter to tell your mum about what you’re working on. It doesn’t matter how small-scale the accountability is - as long as it’s there it’ll work for you.

Just like it’s worked for me today when I really couldn’t be bothered to write this email, but now it’s done and I can finally sleep :P

Have a great week!

Ali

1 - Podcast - I enjoyed Sam Harris’ discussion with Caitlin Flanagan (Journey into Wokeness) which touched on lots of topics that I’d encountered at university, and ended up throwing even more questions than I’d had before.

2 - Article - A really solid post from Khe at Rad Reads called ’How to make work feel like play’. The process vs outcome thing applies just as well to student life as it does to working life.

3 - Article - This post (Self-Education: Teach Yourself Anything with the Sandbox Method) does a good job of explaining how you can teach yourself literally anything by following a simple set of principles. I regularly get emails from viewers asking for advice on how to learn various things - this article is now the first thing I direct them to.

From The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. Resurfaced with Readwise.