“Push to Completion Responsibility or accountability isn’t about starting a task or a project. It happens when we carry it to completion. For example, every now and then I ask someone to help me find something or get a hold of someone. A few days go by and I don’t hear back, so I follow up on my request. “I looked it up but couldn’t find anything” is the answer I get, or “I e-mailed him but haven’t gotten a reply back yet.” Those who are brilliant at pushing to completion do all the things the rest of us do to start a task and when they run into a roadblock, figure out all the other ways they can continue to make progress. They don’t simply repeat what they’ve done. When asked about their progress they don’t reply, “I’ll try to e-mail him again.” The really gifted Completers start thinking about what workarounds they can use if whatever they tried before isn’t working well enough or quickly enough. Even if they never end up having to use that next step, it’s already been considered. The gift of this practice is that the next time a similar challenge comes up, ideas are already generated, and new relationships already exist thanks to the way they handled things the previous time. This is what makes them so resourceful. It’s not how they solved one problem, it’s how prepared they are to solve the next problem.”