Accountability
This is the first of a new type of article that I wanted to start writing for a while. Generally, I like a lot of detail, but those deep-dives take a lot of time and research, and I tend to like long, uninterrupted hours of work for those kinds of pieces - something I don’t often have these days unfortunately. It’s not like I’ve written a ton of articles, but not having contiguous blocks of time allocated for this definitely has prevented me from writing more. I intend for these to be short and focused, and perhaps a little bit more general and less music-specific. Hopefully these changes push me to write more frequently as well. Do bear in mind all these thoughts are my opinion, and it’s as much for me as it is for others to read, since writing helps me organise my thoughts. As always, hope you find something in here that helps you out, one way or another.
I believe that being accountable, not to others, but to yourself, is one of the most important things (if not the most important thing) when looking to continuously self-improve. There are many aspects of accountability that I would like to talk about, but I want to focus on one thing - blame.
Being accountable for everything you do means taking responsibility for all your actions. This means that you are responsible for all your successes, as well as all your failures. Unsurprisingly, most people can accept the former readily, but not the latter. The important thing here is that the potential for the largest growth is in accepting the failures, and learning from them. Nothing happens if you brush your failures under the rug - after all, if you keep doing that, how will you ever learn what not to do to prevent failure? To be accountable to yourself, you need to look at yourself in the mirror often, and be brutally honest about it. Basically, you need to get really comfortable with the blame falling on yourself.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean blaming yourself for everything even if it's not your fault. I expect there to be a rational and logical process that determines if the blame for a consequence of an action unequivocally points to you.
It is important to be able to accept that something is your fault, and to do so not emotionally, but logically. By understanding and analysing the action and consequence at a deeper level, you figure out how to prevent the negative outcome, and likely learn more about yourself in the process.
What I'm about to say from this point onwards may not work for everybody, but it has worked for me and I hope works for some of you out there.
When you are looking to improve at something, anything, you set targets for yourself. Getting used to accepting your own failures in meeting these goals is, frankly, quite difficult, especially if you're an individual who is stubborn and has a lot of pride. However, it can most definitely be trained. You can achieve this by just doing one thing:
When setting targets and goals, make sure you remove as many external elements that can be blamed when things go wrong.
The easier way of saying this is: make sure everything that can go wrong in the process of meeting your goals is your fault. Yes, I just told you to make sure you can blame yourself and only yourself for everything that can possibly go wrong in reaching your targets and goals. By doing so, what you're aiming to do is to remove all the possible ways that you can shirk responsibility - everything that goes wrong is your fault, because you set up the situation so.
Here's an example - let's say I wanted to practice my instrument for two hours a day. What else other than myself could I blame if I couldn't do it?
Distracted by others texting me: switch off my phone for two hours, or put it somewhere else
Setting up practice environment is hard: have as much of it set up as possible, so you need to do the minimum amount of work when you want to start
Too tired to practice: well, that's my fault isn't it
etc.
Analyse the situation, and remove everything that you may be able to blame even remotely when you don’t meet your target. Do this often enough, and you will find this being the default method in which you set goals for yourself.
Facing your failures head on is not easy. I had to fight my instinctive defensiveness that began to flare up as soon as I just began going through this process consciously, and it was pretty fucking difficult to get used to it. But like anything in life, if you do something repetitively and continuously reflect on it, you get better at it. At this point, it is an invaluable tool that I use all the time when I'm trying to achieve something, with the added bonus that I can now achieve things faster than I used to be able to. With this, I don't fear failure as much as I do, as I now know the huge benefits that can come from simply looking at your failures and asking the question why.
Do bear in mind that there are definitely going to be external factors you cannot remove from your targets - that's just how life is. You can't blame yourself if there's some kind of family emergency, natural disaster or anything along those lines (hopefully).
The idea is just to minimise the possibility of you taking the easy way out of a failure, and as painful as it may be in the early stages, it's actually quite liberating down the road to know that everything that went wrong is your fault. Why?
It's easier to change yourself than to change others.
You have no control over how others are, but you have control of yourself. You can actually fix everything that went wrong since everything is your fault. How liberating is that? Understanding this gives you near-unlimited potential to self-improve.
Thanks for reading, and hope you found some of this helpful.
