Accountability and Vision — Using this to plan for my success
Recently my partner asked me why I don’t write more. Writing to me is like food for the soul (excuse the pun), its always been a way for me to deal with my own insecurities and failings by understanding them on a deeper level through pen and paper.
It’s also a very personal experience, anyone who knows me well enough knows that I tend to be fairly closed off but keen to build a deeper understanding of how others operate as a way to better reflect on my own short comings.
However even if I know its good for me and enjoy it, it doesn’t mean that I necessarily find time for it. In the same way I know vitamins are good for me but sometimes I forget to take them on a daily basis — this got me thinking.
Good habits and activities are repeatable actions that we are accountable for — I am held accountable for my attendance and tasks at work or school and therefore am obliged to comply to this and believe on a sub-conscious level that this brings me value. The funny truth is that my peers and managers have repeatedly told me that I score high on levels of accountability, its one of my positive strengths.

So I started looking at why accountability is important and realised that I think accountability can’t be done in isolation. In a work situation accountability would be shown in scenario’s such as being the adjudicator helping resolving issues in a team and finding a way forward or empowering people to meet their professional targets. However in all these situations there is commonality and a shared goal or vision that one is achieving without which the accountability is meaningless. Much like someone who is guilty of a crime yet confesses not guilty, someone wouldn’t build a rocket ship to space for no reason they both need reason and meaning to be held accountable. In the case of the offender perhaps the vision of extended prison life leads to this accountability and in the case of the rocket ship giving humans the opportunity to be multiplanetary by moving to Mars is the driving force that leads to the individual being held accountable for their actions to realise that vision.
The same should apply to one’s personal life, and specifically my own personal life. So I am going to use the medium of writing as a mechanism to be more accountable and foster my personal goal to explore intellectual area’s of interest which I always claim to have no time for. Current themes I am interested in researching into are topic’s like belief and pressure, fear and change in an effort to work on my own inefficiencies. However for me to succeed I have to be realistic with myself, for now I am going to try and write one article a month spending no more than a few hours. I think one of the issues with accountability is one has to be able to succeed. You can be held accountable for the world’s problems but have to be realistic of your capacity to influence or the accountability will be null and void hence I have opted to lower the barrier to entry to give myself the opportunity to increase the barrier in the future.
I have decided (for now) to make this public as an effort to make myself accountable as “now I have said it to everyone I must do it”. Along the way for anyone interested their maybe an article or two of interest but for now I am doing this primarily just to hold myself accountable.
