accountability - Clayton Lengel-Zigich

The FAIL Monster Loves Excuses

Do you remember watching the FAIL Monster on Sesame Street? Never heard of the FAIL Monster? Weird, I’m pretty sure he was Cookie Monster’s cousin or something. He would pop-up and sing a little song about your failures and then at the end he would go crazy and NOM NOM NOM all of your excuses. The really strange thing is that when I grew up, I still saw the FAIL Monster, except he was all over, eating up everyone’s excuses, not just mine. When was the last time the FAIL Monster paid you a visit?

The FAIL Monster Is Your Worst Best Friend

When you first meet him you’re trying to figure out what this asshole is doing hanging out right after you really screwed up. You realize that he’s no good, but as time goes on, you start enjoying his company. He loves showing up because he knows there will be excuses aplenty.

Here are some situations when you might see him:

You’ve messed up and can’t take responsibility
The project is off track and it’s not at all your fault
If only < outside agent > would have completed < task > on time
You start using Fat Bastard’s circular logic to explain away your problems
“I don’t have < resource > to do < what is right >
You don’t write tests

Put the FAIL Monster on a Diet

Here is a quick guide to help you trim down your personal FAIL Monster:

Quit making so many goddamned excuses!

Stop making excuses for your lack of understanding, your irresponsibility, your lack of prospects and your shit attitude. Take the time to push yourself, learn a new skill, read a book, meet people, take a leadership role, achieve greatness and succeed.

You can make excuses for everything, the only thing they’re good for is feeding your own FAILURE.

Goals and Personal Accountability

I was watching a show over memorial day weekend on the National Geographic channel about recruits training to become Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies. These people go through what appears to be a fairly intense eighteen weeks of physical training, classroom work and weapons training. They didn’t really go over the barriers to entry as far as applying goes, but from the looks of it, they were not too stringent. One thing that was interesting were the varying levels of dedication that each recruit had toward the end goal of graduating and becoming an actual Deputy.

Highly Motivated, Truly Dedicated

The recruits had a motto that they shouted during various exercises. They were “highly motivated” and “truly dedicated”. I liked the sound of that, it means a lot if you actually believe in it. This got me thinking, how motivated and dedicated am I with my projects?

I’d like to think that I’m highly motivated and truly dedicated to completing some task or tasks related to bringing life to a project, but for the most part I’m not sure that I am. It was easy to sit there and scoff at the people who didn’t put 100% into their efforts and had “failed” but in a moment of honest personal accountability I realized that I wasn’t much different.

My 50 / 30 / 20 Rule

Going forward I plan on trying to spend my time based on the following breakdown. 50% is spent on tasks directly related to completing my project (coding, writing, solving). 30% is spent on tasks in-directly related to completing my task (reading, learning, trying) and 20% is not related to completing my project (web, e-mail, feed reader).

I took an hour of time over the weekend and tried this out and I found that I was closer to 30/30/30 spending about the same amount of time working directly on my project as I did goofing around on the internet, not exactly motivated and dedicated. I was able to keep myself accountable for the time I had “wasted” not actually working, and it helped to put things in perspective.

How much longer are you going to let that stack of projects sit and collect dust? You owe it to yourself to spend a little more time being accountable for your lack of success.