If punctuality is the virtue of the bored, then productivity is the virtue of the unfulfilled.
Call it the universe conspiring to help me achieve god tier productivity, but my YouTube recommendations lately have been filled with several videos titled “rewire your brain” and “overcome procrastination” and my personal favourite, “lofi hip hop radio”. Naturally, I found myself in a Johnny Harris rabbit hole. For the unacquainted, Johnny Harris is a former video journalist for Vox Media who has now taken his reporting skills over to his Youtube channel.
And that’s how I stumbled across this term for the first time. Excited accountability.
So what is excited accountability?
You need to be excited about the project. Find a project that aligns to your interests and passions.
You need a good amount of pressure to create that accountability.
In hindsight, I realise that I have actually ignorantly put myself in positions of excited accountability before. I didn’t have the proper terminology so I usually just called it “stepping out of my comfort zone”. But this is different, and I’ll explain why.
Rewind to 2020. The year of Corona, Folklore and Megxit. While the world was supposedly crumbling, I turned to my work as a coping mechanism. My advisor approached me with an opportunity. My seniors had formed a team for the European Rover Competition and there was a spot open. Was I in? Hell yeah, I was.
Here’s the thing. I knew nothing about rovers, nothing about ROS, and had a very rudimentary understanding of mechanics. I was clearly not technically qualified to be there. Now I had a deadline, and with it the pressure I needed to speed up my learning curve. In the span of a month, I was able to familiarise myself with the software and get up to speed with the project. Was it hard? Yes. Were there points when I felt like I wasn’t cut out for it? Yes. Did I do it anyway? Also, yes.
Ego-fuelled pressure
In a span of a month, I was able to learn concepts that otherwise would’ve taken me a good 4-5 months. I always thought I was the sort of person who did not perform well under pressure. This is where the fine print comes in. I, and probably most people, perform badly when faced with fear-based pressure. However, there’s a type of pressure that comes when you have a desire to impress. I like to call this “ego-fuelled pressure”.
The trick is not to take so much accountability that if the project fails you’re gonna be in hot water. Yet, you should be accountable enough that not finishing it would make you feel kinda icky. And most importantly you’ve got to like what you’re doing. If you’re not excited about it, wouldn’t you rather be doing something else anyways?
As I’m sitting here with 20 different tabs open on my browser, hoping I’ve done a good job writing this post, wondering if I’m going to be burnt out soon, I can’t help but think how awesome it would be if we had the answer key to Life. But that’s the funny thing about life, it may be a test but there’s no answer key out there. Only cheat codes. And if there’s a cheat code for learning, I’m pretty sure this is it.
