The Only Aspect of Your Life to be Successful that is Missing

By Johnny Tsimogiannis

“Success” is an extremely overused term in the modern world. Most people use success to simply connote financial freedom/stability, and the issue is that many oversimplify the outcome of what success means, yet overcomplicate the strategies required to achieve this outcome. Ultimately, success is a subjective word, and so to combat this, the definition I have chosen to adopt for this is “The accomplishment of goals that have been set by an individual in their lives.”. Now, there are many goals that people tend to share, such as wealth, a ‘perfect’ partner, a nice house, and others, but the core concept of success is achieving those goals, regardless of what they are. With this pre-defined meaning, it is possible to see one trait that can easily allow you to maximise your success in life, and that trait is self-accountability, and you NEED this if you are serious about excelling. Self-accountability is a concept that the majority have a lot of trouble with, and few actually have a deep understanding of what it means. Self-accountability can be broken down into 4 main categories, and I will share them with you, as well as explaining the importance of them when looking at success, and how YOU can implement them into your own lives.

1. Self-Reflection

Self-reflection is the first element of self-accountability that should be mentioned. Self-reflection is exactly what it sounds like; the act of reflecting on one’s achievements, actions, thoughts, and overall behaviour. After careful consideration, I have decided that the most effective way to implement this is through a logbook. Each logbook entry would include all tasks that were completed each day, as well as any tasks that were not completed, that were supposed to be. This way, the events in your daily life are more structured, and you can outline what activities have been and need to be finished. Through this process, less time is spent procrastinating, figuring out what you need to do, thinking you’re bored. The reality is that you have things to do, and identifying them at the beginning and end of each day gives you a chance to reflect on your situation. Any goal in life that requires many smaller goals to be completed, which is quite common in life, will benefit from self-reflection. Apart from writing down just the activities you’ve done during the day, you can also mention how you have felt, what emotions you experienced, and why. This permits you to establish trends for how and why you feel the way you do. For instance, a day where you did no work, sat in bed all day, and felt lethargic/unmotivated allows you to see the connection between those events. Clearly, you either sat in bed and did nothing because you were lethargic, OR, the more likely option, you felt these negative defects BECAUSE you were lazy and didn’t do anything, or maybe even both. A second example would be having another logbook entry that states how you were very productive and accomplished multiple desired tasks, and by the end of the day you felt physically and mentally tired, yet had a much lower stress recording, felt happier and motivated, and overall felt a sense of completion. Obviously, from these two simple, yet informative entries, it can be seen that doing work, even when you do not feel like it, although it makes you feel tired, provides you with more positive emotions, and ultimately permits you to get more done.

2. Self-Comparison

There’s a book by psychology professor Jordan Peterson called “12 Rules for Life”, and there’s a fabulous quote that’s actually one of the rules described in the book that reads “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”. This statement is a powerful tool and mantra that I and many others utilise as a method of retaining the reminder that everyone’s experiences are completely different, and so while comparing yourself to others to some extent can be a source of motivation, it’s almost always beneficial to keep that as a substantial goal, and measure your smaller progressions by comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, a week ago, months ago, even years ago, and can apply to any aspect of your life. For example, if you have your own business, you could simply compare the amount of profit you’ve generated each week, and use that to determine any lacklustre weeks you’ve had, and why they occurred/what changes can be made to rectify the issue. Another example could be if you’re learning a language, comparing your progress over each week is a brilliant technique to give yourself feedback; Are you actually learning anything each week? If not, why? What can you do to combat this? These kind of questions are what help you realise whether or not you’re actually advancing at the speed you hope to, and assists you in setting reasonable yet slightly farfetched goals based on what your current rate is.

Read Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life book before implementing self-comparison effectively: https://amzn.to/40modDM

3. Responsibility

Responsibility is what we often imagine when thinking of self-accountability, and responsibility is simply defined as the duty to deal with something. For example, if you have responsibility over completing your work for university, which all who attend university do, it’s not up to anyone else to watch out for you, to help you with your work, or to guide you in any way. They can, but it isn’t their responsibility to, it’s YOUR responsibility to take action and do what you need to do. Sitting there making excuses such as “I couldn’t complete it because my friends were distracting me”, or “We weren’t given enough time to do this”, or “I didn’t have enough time because of this and that” is not going to help you. If you don’t complete something that you have responsibility over, it is your fault, nobody else’s. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, you could break your leg, and it would still be your fault if you couldn’t make it somewhere that you had the responsibility to be at. Sure, it may be extremely difficult, it may feel impossible, it may just be unfair, but that’s a crucial part of life. There are going to be times when things don’t go your way, there will be times when justice isn’t served appropriately, it happens to everyone, and so you NEED to suck it up and take responsibility for it, even if it damages your ego; that’s vital for success. Let’s take another example; you’re fat and lazy. Severely overweight, addicted to video games, eating crap all day, drinking crap all day, doing no work, earning no money, and possessing pitiful social skills. Who is to blame? “Well my metabolism is slow, and my genetics make it difficult” Your fault. “But I get bullied and mocked, this is my way of coping” Your fault again. “I got cheated on and I need some time to heal and find myself” I know people love this one, and yet it would still be your fault. None of these are valid excuses. They may be part of the reason why you are the way you are, but you have as much control over your situation as anybody else on planet earth does. Some people experience objectively harder circumstances than others, but compiling everyone, on average, unless you’re actively being physically restrained constantly and tortured to the point of near death daily, you can change yourself for the better. People have and are doing it right now, and so can you.

4. Goal Setting

Transitioning into the final element of self-accountability, goal setting is one of the most important. Goal setting is relatively self-explanatory, and something that a lot of people are aware of. However, it isn’t necessarily setting the goals themselves that’s the complex part, it’s actually constructing and executing the processes that are mandatory to complete those goals. Anyone can set arbitrary goals like “Make a million dollars”, that doesn’t mean anything at all unless you actually have a system in place for accomplishing that. How are you going to make a million dollars? Pull it out of a magic hat? Stumble on the sidewalk and fall onto the winning lottery ticket? It sounds ridiculous, but people still make this mistake over and over, an insane amount of times. In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he states “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”. There’s a lot of truth to this, because your systems are the daily habits you apply to reach a given goal. James Clear elaborates on this concept extensively, and so if you want to achieve the goals you put in place for yourself, I would STRONGLY recommend reading Atomic Habits as soon as possible, to master this skill.

Atomic Habits is available here: https://amzn.to/3ZmSdxK

So yes, goal setting is important, but setting and implementing the systems required to achieve that goal is what drives success. Not only that, but it also puts you in a better long-term position. What I mean by that is if you set a goal such as to gain a certain amount of upper body muscle mass, once you gain that amount, it feels as though you’ve completed your objective, and there’s nothing else to it. The systems you used to get there will feel less valuable, and so your interest in sustaining them may eventually deplete. However, if you focus on the system you need to have in order to gain that muscle mass, such as going to the gym a certain amount of times a week, and/or altering your diet, those habits will become second nature to you, and so even once your original goal has been reached, your systems will likely remain in place, and benefit your health further, allowing you to keep these activities in your life long-term, leading to future success.