The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)

Lack of Accountability
The link between success and accountability is irrefutable.
Virtually all highly successful people—from CEOs to professional
athletes to the President of the United States—embrace a high
degree of accountability. It gives them the leverage they need to
take action and create results, even when they don’t feel like it.
Without it, we’d have a lot more pro-athletes skipping practice, and
CEOs spending their days playing Words With Friends
TM
on their
iPhones. I’m sure some are already doing that (I’m guilty of it
occasionally), but we’d have a lot more.
Accountability is the act of being responsible to someone else
for some action or result. Very little happens in this world, or in
your life, without some form of accountability. Virtually every
positive result you and I produced from birth to age eighteen was
thanks to the accountability provided for us by the adults in our
lives (parents, teachers, bosses, etc.) Vegetables got eaten,
homework was completed, teeth were brushed, we bathed and got
to bed at a reasonable hour. If it weren’t for the accountability
provided for us by our parents and teachers, we would have been

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uneducated, malnourished, sleep-deprived, dirty little kids! Nice
way to reframe it, right?
Accountability has brought order to our lives and allowed us to
progress, improve and achieve results we wouldn’t have otherwise.
Here’s the problem: accountability was never something you and I
asked for, but rather something that we endured as children, teens,
and young adults. As it was forced upon us by adults, most of us
unconsciously grew to resist and resent accountability altogether.
Then, when we turned 18, we embraced every ounce of freedom we
could get our hands on, continuing to avoid accountability like it
was the plague, perpetuating a downward spiral into mediocrity,
developing detrimental mindsets and habits such as laziness,
deflecting responsibility, and taking short cuts—hardly a recipe for
success.
Now that we are all grown up and striving to achieve worthy
levels of success and fulfillment, we must take responsibility for
initiating our own systems for accountability (or move back in with
our parents). Your accountability system could be a professional
coach, mentor, even a good friend or family member. The reality is
that, statistically, 95% of the people that read any book don’t
implement what they learn, because no one is holding them
accountable to do so. There is a way to change that.