Accountability quotes
These are my 13 favourite quotes about accountability to yourself and what they mean to me. You can hide my thoughts using the toggle button above if you just want to see the quotes. When I talk about accountability here, what I really mean is personal accountability. Not to your family or an organisation but to yourself.
Stephen's 7 habits of highly effective people had a huge impact on me when I first read it. That was more than twenty years ago. It was the first "self-help" book that I ever read. In it he speaks about your ability to choose your response to any situation. There is a gap between cause and effect. If you are consistently accounatble to yourself you can expand that gap and eventually choose how events will affect you, rather than it being automatic.
I haven't read any Molière but his quote stopped me in my tracks when I first read it. It is different to most quotes on responsibility, which generally only speak about what we are doing. Molière is talking about what we do not do. This may be because we do not want to do them or worse, have not considered doing them. Not considering actions is a failure of perspective. Putting your head down in order to focus on achieving something is only a good idea if you have properly surveyed what all your options are first.
Take the team and organisation piece out of this quote and I think it would be more impactful. I love the concept of life ownership. It is a better way of phrasing than life accountability or responsibility. Taking ownership of your own life evokes a sense of action. A real sense of ownership of your life is a powerful weapon indeed.
I don't know who Jerry Fernandez is :( I couldn't find anything about him. No matter. I like the simplicity of this quote. It is very true. I try not to judge people by what they say but rather by what they do. If you are accountable to yourself then you should worry about what you do and how you keep the promises that you have made to yourself.
In spite of the fact that every image of John Di Lemme are as cheesy as the one above, it's a wise quote. For me anyway, personal accountability is all about the little things. The daily habits that get me to take action and improve myself just a tiny little bit every day. I track my progress on those items (using Angstrom of course), in order to make sure that I take those daily baby steps.
I tried this. He's wrong. Three point at you and your thumb points forward. Semantics aside. I get what he's saying. We often do try to blame others for us not achieving our own goals or dreams. This is not how we should operate. If you want to achieve something truly important you can't blame anyone else you need to take full ownership of success and failure.
I have been guilty of this myself. I guess that is why I am including this quote here. It's not really in context with personal accountability but it's something that regularly comes up if you are working with others. It's worth thinking about.
This echoes the quote above but brings it back to personal accountability at the same time. We should focus much more on our own responsibility to ourselves as we all do see it as a valuable trait in others.
Again following this theme of accountability to others is not where the game is really at.
This is especially true when you say something to yourself. The only way to build true self-respect is to follow-through on the promises that you have made to yourself.
Possibly this should have been the first quote. It is the one that summarises my own feelings on this subject the best.
Accountability is regularly seen as a dirty word. It's not. That's why I like this quote so much. It gives you power. It can change your perspective and benefit you if you are consistently being accounable to yourself.
Agreed.
Dominate your life.
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