One of the things that is an uncomfortable topic for me to share with people because I'm a bad practitioner of it, but I've learned how to manage myself despite my bad habits. And it's a question that a lot of people struggle with because it can have an impact in so many parts of our lives, but it's a simple topic of accountability. Now, I'm not bad at accountability. I work pretty hard to make my commitments and keep them and to live up to the expectations I've created with other people, not just in my business life, but in my personal life. I don't think you can master that skill in one aspect and ignore it in the other. So I'm always going to reinforce that my business and my life are essentially the same thing. It's just part of me existing here on this earth.
But as far as accountability, what I'm really asking you to focus on is your willingness to be accountable for the behaviors that you need to do to be successful, whether it's in your business or in your health regimen or all the other things that we've got to do with regularity and consistency to make life as enjoyable and to make business as profitable and successful as we can.
So there's an old idea that someone shared with me a long time ago about why people really fell in love with ATM machines. And back when they came out, we all, my generation, we all learned to tap MAC and that was to take your MAC card and put it in the local terminal wherever you would find one. And you could check your account balances at the bank with never balancing your checkbook. At least that's what we thought we could do. That as long as you could tap MAC and pull that paper out of there and it said you had $74.83, you were good to go off to the next bar, have another drink. I'm not broke yet. It was kind of a running joke, but it really became more of a cultural phenomenon where people just used this amazingly convenient access to information to avoid doing what they had to do to be financially responsible. As long as the ATM can spit out a $10 bill, I'm good to go. Don't worry about it until I can't get anything out of that machine. Well, what's my reference to that? If you're not tracking the accountability of you doing your prospecting, your workouts and the things you need to do to take care of your business and your body, you're probably not going to know that you're overdrawn until it's too late.
So in business, you could be overdrawn on doing a lot of things that aren't really going to make you money. We really aren't going to get you out into the market to prospect and to have the right amount of business conversations so that you have the chance to collect the right number of decisions to cash enough checks. And once you understand that the front end of the process has to be where the accountability is, you can manage what you do to get to the right type of output at the bottom. So you must be accountable to the right amount of activity and not just look at the results of what you got paid last month or what your commission check was. So the statement that really brought that to light was one day when the guy that got me into this business said, do you know why most people never check their bank account balance or never take the time to really balance their checkbook? And it was a very, very painful moment for me at that time because I was as guilty as anyone that could anyone in the room that could have been sitting there listening to this.
And the reason I never balanced my checkbook back then, I didn't want to know how broke I was. And the longer I could go with avoiding that information, the more I could fool myself on whether or not I was managing myself and my business opportunities the right way. And so look, I had to learn not to be a rummy in preachers clothing. I had to get serious about accountability and the more serious I became about it, the more successful I became. I don't think it was an accident. I think it just made me more aware, more professional and more conscious of what it took to be successful. Now, I will tell you, be perfectly upfront about this, in my business I don't balance the checkbooks. In my personal life I don't balance the checkbooks. But I do work with one person in my business and I work with one person in my personal life that takes care of that information for me. And we check in enough with each other that I know what's going on and what's there. And our ability to make decisions, good sound business decisions based on that updated and regularly checked information, makes running my business and running my household a whole lot easier. So don't operate in the dark. Don't live in a world of assumptions. Make a commitment.
Am I doing enough of the right things?
Am I saving enough of my money the right way?
Am I planning enough to have the future I want to have and to enjoy the success that is critical and paramount to me having the best time I can have?
So don't fool yourselves any longer. Get serious about it or at least a little more serious in this second quarter and take control of your life, your finances and your health. Thanks for listening and watching. Have a great Friday, a great weekend and make it a kickass next week. Take care.
