You'll Owe It To Me

You should join our club...and your friend.

I’ve set and missed more goals than I can count. And not in the James Cameron “set audacious goals because even if you miss by a little it’ll be incredible,” kind of way. In the “three months later I realize I forgot about it,” kind of way. I think the technical term for that kind of miss is “weak.”

I don’t mean to make the point that I don’t achieve any of my goals, more that I miss completely attainable ones. Often - the smaller, the easier ones.

The technical term is definitely “weak.”

On a little more thought I think there are two reasons this happens for me; lack of a plan (but more on that later) and more importantly; lack of accountability. I’d like to think I’m generally a self motivated person but sometimes that’s just not enough. Sometimes I need something - someone - to be accountable to.

Being accountable can be a bear. I’m confident I learned the meaning of that word while not delivering on the meaning of that word. It might as well be a four letter word with its versatility and weight. It’s a noun, a verb, an adjective...an albatross.

Harvard Business Review has written papers about how to be accountable and how to hold others accountable. Amazon has 3,000 book search results for the word. Google has 1,270,000. It’s estimated that 80% of New Years Resolutions fail. Suffice to say I’m not alone in finding accountability a bit elusive.

A few years back I’d been feeling physically...off. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but I was tired, felt heavy, slow. I was sleeping like shit. I just felt off. So I found a health coach who had me track how I was living for a week. When I woke up, what I ate, when I slept, how I slept, how late I worked… what my days looked like. That week showed what you’d think - I was eating garbage, staying up to late staring at screens, not meditating, and not regularly exercising. She gave me a bunch of changes to make and I told her I’d already tried it all.

“Yeah, but you weren’t accountable.” She said. “You only had yourself to let down. This time I’m going to track you and you’ll be accountable to reporting what you eat, when you sleep, and how you take care of yourself to me. You don’t owe this to yourself, you owe it to me - don’t waste my time.”

And with that it all turned around. A week of reporting things like my bed time to someone else and a few more of taking her recommendations and reporting on those and I felt great. Being accountable to someone else was the key to doing things that only impacted me.

I realized it’s easy to be accountable when it impacts other people. If nothing else I don’t want to let them down. It’s a lot harder when no one is watching.

Knowing this put me in a weird spot. I’d found this secret way of achieving things that I was having a hard time with; but it required someone else caring about my goals. It didn’t seem practical or reasonable to ask friends to care about what I was working on without taking on the responsibility of caring what they were working on. I’d show them mine if they showed me theirs. A sort of growth based mutually assured destruction.

I was talking with Jeremy about this and he’d been thinking about the same thing. At the same time we’d both just read Living With a Seal and Can’t Hurt Me, both about David Goggins, who is guaranteed to make anyone feel soft. We were both feeling like we could benefit from a little discomfort and from a little accountability. We came up with an idea of designing intense workouts and owing that workout, done independently, to each other.

We started with a five mile run plus 200 burpees and 100 pushups to be done in under an hour. At 3:00 in the morning in shorts and a t-shirt in January. Jeremy roped in another friend and now we were all on the hook to one another to get in done in a week. We all did it on different nights, all when it was freezing out, and all in the week we agreed on. It was a brutal workout and I felt incredible after it. I can say for certain I’d still be thinking about doing that workout some day if I hadn’t made myself accountable to two other people.

We kept workouts like that going for months. A year or so later I mentioned to Jeremy I wanted to do a punishing amount of reps of one exercise in one month to see how far I could go. I asked him if he’d hold me to 2,500 pushups.

“Ten thousand sounds better,” was his response.

Thirty days later I’d done 10,001 push ups (the extra to remind myself there’s no finish line). I’d never done 300 push ups in a day once before - let alone day after day after day. But I was accountable to Jeremy and he checked in with me daily. Over a year later we have a group of people who pick a new exercise every month and we owe 10,001 reps to each other. It’s surprising what kind of repetitive punishment you can take when you’re being held accountable. (Click below to give it a shot).

I’ve found that almost nothing has helped me achieve my goals more than owing them to someone else and so I’ll finish this post with an offer; if you’ve got a goal getting away from you, or that you haven’t been able to find the motivation to start, shoot me an email at brandon@projectkathekon.com and I’ll be your accountability partner. And just like my health coach said to me - you won’t owe it to yourself anymore, you’ll owe it to me.

B