don't pay for accountability without this one thing

Summary

Gary Keller, the guy behind The One Thing, hired an intern to document his processes. an intern. the point wasn’t the work. the point was the accountability. someone was there, watching, and that made him follow through.

accountability is one of the highest leverage tools in business. the research is solid, you’re significantly more likely to hit a goal when someone is checking on you, and even more likely when money is on the line.

the thing nobody talks about is accountability only works if you’re actually enabled to act on it. if your calendar is already full, if you don’t have the habits, if you don’t have an inch of space in your week, hiring a coach won’t save you. you’ll just feel worse about the same problem.

before you pay anyone to hold you accountable, make the room. clear the calendar. build the habits. then the accountability has somewhere to land and you’ll actually do the work.

Transcript

introduction to the power of accountability in both personal and business contexts

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. One of the most powerful resources we have as human beings to achieve things.

So goal achievement is accountability. Accountability will get you wherever you want to go. But a lot of people screw this up. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And I’ve been thinking about accountability a lot as it’s something I implement all over my life, not just business like my life. And I’ll never forget, I got to spend a day with Gary Keller, who’s the founder of Keller Williams. And he has this story he tells about when he was building up these franchises, Keller Williams franchises.

insightful story of Gary Keller and the role of accountability in documenting business processes

He was pretty good at it, right? He had the systems, the processes for scaling these franchises. And he needed to document it. But he knew he wasn’t going to be able to document it himself. He didn’t truly know what he was doing. What makes me special is kind of what he was trying to figure out and be able to document something for another franchisee to be able to use. And so what he did was he hired a college kid, basically like an intern, to hold a camera and film him in an audio recorder and to write down everything that he did, record all of his actions, and then basically turned that into the manual on how to run a Keller Williams franchise.

And while that’s a great story about how to document your systems and processes, the main takeaway for me and thing he talks about is the fact that by hiring this college kid, who’s probably like a very nominal fee overall, that was baked in accountability to him making sure he got the thing done, right? Someone showing up with a camera at a certain time for the whole day or for the full week, whatever it is, you know that’s happening.

And when you know something like that’s happening, you’re going to prepare. You’re going to make sure that you’re more on point that day because you’re being recorded. You know, this is going to be utilized in further parts of your business. And so you’re trying to be perfect every minute throughout the day. And this person doesn’t care, like in his example, like this college kid doesn’t care that he just wants the hundred bucks or whatever he’s getting paid to be able to do this thing.

But because you have that accountability there, you’re going to go much further. And accountability is so incredibly important. I actually do this in almost every area of my life where I know I need to be accountable if I want to start a new habit. And you know, a few examples of this, like I wanted to start running in the morning and I want something to have me hold me accountable to doing that. And so I got a dog that can run right like that.

personal examples of embedding accountability into daily routines for consistent execution

That’s one thing that I did. This dog is super high energy. If she doesn’t run or walk in the morning, she’ll terrorize us. She’s just so high energy. She has to get a lot of energy out in the morning. And so me knowing that, hey, you have to basically run her. You basically have to walk her. I just have this other living being that’s now holding me accountable to a new habit. I wanted to start anyway.

And so that’s awesome. But another like this, it goes one step further. Also, I know having this dog, I want her to be really well trained. And so I hired a trainer who comes to my house, you know, once a week, once every other week to kind of check in on the training. So she will, I have to teach her all these tricks and things and like obedience and all these kinds of things. And he kind of guides me through how to do that, how to teach her.

And then, you know, he leaves, he’s gone for two weeks, and then it’s up to me to stay consistent in the training. But guess what? I know this dude’s coming to my house. He’s coming to my house in two weeks. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have the dog that like forgot all the obedience training and everything else. I don’t want to be the loser that he comes and he’s like, well, this is going to be a waste of time because I’m paying the dude, right?

And so I also don’t want to waste my money with him coming over. So you see, it’s a multi-layered accountability just with my dog. It’s okay. I want to run it every morning. I’ll get a dog. I got this dog. It has to run. So I’m going to make sure that she runs. But this type of dog needs to be well trained. So I hired a trainer to make sure I stay on top of my training.

how professional engagements enhance preparation and dedication to business tasks

I’m not just relying on my willpower, my discipline to make sure I train her, right? They’re built in layers and levels of accountability. And I’ve done the same thing with the creation of content. I’m creating a lot more content. And so I have a videographer who comes to my house one once a month. Same in the Gary killer example. This guy’s coming to my house. He’s going to film content for me. I’m going to be prepared.

I’m not, he’s not going to show up and I’m going to be like, well, I don’t know. Well, I guess we’ll do something. I’m going to spend a lot of time in preparation to make sure that his time is well used. The money I’m spending to have him come over is, you know, a good investment. So I’m going to be very prepared for when he shows up. I also have a video editor, video editor who’s on the hook for editing all those videos.

And it’s a certain number. So even when the video videographer comes, I can’t just be lazy and be like, you know what? Let’s just do three to five videos today. That’s a waste of the videographer’s time. But also my, my video editor is expecting a certain amount of volume or output for his work capacity that I need. I’m on the hook to deliver. And so you see how I do this throughout my life. Anytime I want something, I want to achieve something.

I start throwing people into the mix. And typically it’s people that I have to pay. So it hurts me financially if I don’t do it. But that’s the lowest motivator for me. The highest motivator is the fact that I don’t want to let someone else down. So I don’t want someone to come to my house or have to cancel the dog trainer coming over because I’m embarrassed that I don’t want to do. That’s the highest motivator for me.

statistical evidence on the effectiveness of accountability in achieving goals

That’s personally. And then the secondary would be a crap and I wasted this money. So you see how accountability works. It’s very, very useful to utilize in every area of your life, especially in business. If you want to achieve a goal. You got to have accountability, you know, there’s a lot of research that goes around all of this. It’s like, you know, a goal achievement and people who write down their goals are more likely to achieve a goal than someone who didn’t write down their goal.

That’s what the science says. That’s what the research say says. But then it goes one step further. People who not only write down their goal, but also have like accountability from another human being, preferably that you pay are 76 percent more likely to achieve the goal. Like accountability is everything. And if you’re not utilizing it in some capacity, you should be no matter what you’re trying to achieve, because even employees can hold you accountable when you hire them, because now you’re on the hook to document a process or create this thing or do what you said you were going to do.

It just makes your follow through a little bit higher. So accountability is really awesome. But the reason I’ve been thinking about accountability a lot is because sometimes it doesn’t work for people. And it doesn’t make sense to me. So I started thinking about more and more, OK, what for the people it doesn’t work for. And, you know, I’ve just seen this. I’ve been in the industry. We have accountability in our business coaching and the businesses that I run, accountability and fitness coaching that I’ve done over the years, and some people.

Thrive on it, some people don’t, and it’s not necessarily like some people are just, OK, letting other people down, it’s really comes down to the fact that they were never enabled to do the thing in the first place. So let’s unpack that just a little bit more. If I want to take this dog on a run every single morning and so, you know, I want to run every morning, I buy this dog, so I will be forced to run every morning.

discussion on why accountability sometimes fails and how to ensure it works for you

But what if there’s this massive conflict in my in my day to where I can’t realistically do anything for the first two to three hours of the day? Like I can’t maybe I sleep in too late and I have to get my kids ready for school and I have to do all these things. Right. So it’s not even actually feasible for me to do it. It is just not on the calendar. It’s just it’s an imaginary thought in my head.

I’m like, yep, you know what? I want to run every morning, get a dog and I’ll start running. But I realistically I like this isn’t me, but let’s just say I don’t run. I don’t like waking up early and I have all these other things to do in the morning. So the chances of this really happening, even if I get the dog, are like five percent max because I have to change like my whole schedule. I have to change the calendar.

I have to change everything. The chances of that working, even though I bought the accountability, the dog, that would be zero. As someone who already wakes up early before the rest of my family and would enjoy running and has done a lot of running in the morning before anyone wakes up, that’s fine by me. But now I have this bait like I already do those things. This is like force account accountability to do it even more consistently than I already have.

Then now I’m enabled. I already have the calendar space. I have the ability. I have the consistency. I have the habits to be able to make that happen. And so what I when I see people fail, they know they have a problem, like they want to solve a problem. They want to achieve a goal. And so they find a coach or a program like, you know what, I’m going to sign up for this thing. They’re going to hold me accountable.

I’m going to do it. But the part that they’re missing is they were never enabled to do it in the first place. They don’t have the habits. They don’t have the calendar space. They don’t have the time to dedicate to do that thing. And that’s the part I want to hit on. Make sure if you’re going to pay for accountability anywhere. Anywhere in any form, whether that’s a business goal, personal goal, you got to make sure that you actually have the time to achieve it.

That’s what I found. Like I’ve been in situations where I mistakenly bought the accountability, hired the coach or whatever, but I didn’t realistically have the time to do anything. They said I can implement it. That the time was too tight. I can implement what they said. I didn’t have really even the time to maybe talk to them. And so you have to assess that first. And if you do have the implementation time, you do have the white calendar space for that.

Then you absolutely should head down this path. But if you’re missing that, your chance of failure, coach or no coach, is going to be, you know, high. You’re the chance of your failure really high. So that is the one thing that you have to clear out. You have to make sure that you have if you’re going to pay for accountability. And if you have that, accountability will get you wherever you want to go so much faster.

I’m so bought in on having accountability. Obviously, you’ve just seen a few areas of my life that I use it and I use it in even way more areas than that. If I were to get into every detail of how I pay for accountability to make sure I get stuff done, because I’m not trying to rely on all of my discipline and willpower. That’s not I don’t want to utilize that every single day. I want forced accountability across every area of my life that I want to improve.

And then I just got to make sure that I’m enabled to do that. I have the space. I have the time I can implement. I can do what I need to do to pay for that accountability, to have that coach, to have that program. But to do all those things, to find the space in your calendar, to implement everything that a coach might tell you, you’re going to have to try harder.