Part of the accountability I found for me was learning something really cool and then being able to share it with other people who appreciated it just as much as I did.
Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA
Keeping any long-term project alive requires accountability. We are not wired to achieve long-term goals: instead, we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive immediate threats. It’s what our neurology, biochemistry and instincts are hardwired for. Long-term projects require that we defer gratification, but we are biologically set up to take the actions that give us pleasure or help us avoid pain in the short term. It’s why big projects are so difficult, and why we need to be accountable to persevere.
A famous experiment was conducted in 1972 by psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University — the now famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. In the study, a marshmallow was offered to each child in the study group of preschoolers. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they were promised two instead of one. The scientists analysed how long each child resisted the temptation to eat the marshmallow, and whether doing so had any correlation with their future success. The results provided researchers with great insight into the psychology of self-control.
While a few children ate the marshmallow immediately, of the more than 600 who took part in the experiment, one-third could defer gratification long ...
