Routine Requires Discipline and Accountability

You may have noticed that the blog has not been updated in the past week. I have to say it’s been an extremely busy week for me.

Although I haven’t blogged, I have been thinking about a number of topics to post about and I plan to do that in the next day or two and over the weekend. I’ve been in complete learning mode. I’m learning from my mentors and advisors, my friends and peers, and the people that I follow and listen to. Alongside that I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about these topics.

This post is about routine and how developing good habits requires both accountability and discipline. In order to stick to the commitment you need someone or something to keep you accountable. What this means is that someone holds you responsible for the actions that you have promised. Discipline is the effort and perseverance it takes to continue to do those action day in and day out.

Because the United States of America is built on a society of instant gratification, this discipline might be much harder than in a nation where the citizens work hard and regard working hard highly. I was listening to a psychology podcast the other day about business leadership and goal setting. Some bloggers proclaim that sharing their goals on their blog is what keeps them accountable because they are now responsible to their audience to complete the actions they committed to.

However the expert psychologist that I listen to said that the feeling of accomplishment came from talking about the goal instead of actually doing it. For example posting about a goal to complete a marathon is just as rewarding as actually accomplishing the goal itself. As a result people post their goals on their blog but they never actually do the action that they have committed to.

Perhaps that is maybe what happened to me. Although I do not have a large readership or reader base on my blog yet, I realize that the goal setting was primarily for myself. However writing is very difficult and doing something consistently for the same on a time during the same period of the day is very difficult.

What I further realize is that sometimes in order to get something done you just have to get started and that often starting is much more difficult than you ever imagined. In a world where social media and e-mail rule our lives, it is very easy to get distracted in start doing something else when that is less important than the task at hand. .

So instead of striving to make every single post on this blog perfectly written, I will continue to write but I’m learning about business, marketing, start-ups, and finance.