Making Cent$ is a monthly newsletter by Mira Katz dedicated to the taboo topics that affect creatives in business. Best enjoyed with a cup of ☕️ and a 🥐.
The Missing Link Between Vision and Results
Lately I’ve been obsessed with this simple fact: people who write down their goals are significantly more likely to achieve them than people who don't.
I am one of those people who writes everything down. My Notes app is a color-coded collection of ideas, reminders, goals, and half-baked thoughts. I keep lists for everything.
I've come to realize there is something incredibly powerful about taking an idea out of your head and putting it somewhere visible.
During my years as a professional advisor for founders I’ve found that they are rarely short on ambition. Most have a clear sense of what they want to build, where they want their company to go, and the life they hope that business will create.
The challenge is not having enough ideas or dreams. The challenge is creating enough structure around those dreams that they stop living exclusively in your imagination and begin existing as a tangible plan.
Psychologist Dr. Gail Matthews put numbers behind something I've observed for years. In her study, participants who simply thought about their goals achieved them 43% of the time. Those who wrote them down increased their success rate to 61%. But the biggest jump happened when accountability entered the picture. Participants who shared their goals and reported on their progress regularly achieved them 76% of the time.
In other words, success is highly linked to accountability.
A Quick Piece of Advice
If you have a goal you're actively working toward, ask yourself:
Have I actually thought about it? Not in passing, but intentionally. Have I spent time journaling, reflecting, and getting clear on what I really want?
Have I written it down? Is it living somewhere outside my head? A notebook, a document, a notes app, a whiteboard, a calendar reminder?
Am I accountable to anyone? A coach, advisor, mastermind, business partner, assistant, friend or anyone who knows the goal and can help keep it visible.
The research suggests that every layer matters.
The Difference Between Thinking About Something and Measuring It
It's easy to confuse mental energy with progress.
I can spend weeks thinking about a hiring decision, a launch, a revenue goal, or a strategic shift. I revisit the same ideas over and over, discussing them with friends, journaling about them, worrying about them, and mentally rehearsing them. Eventually the goal occupies so much space in my mind that it begins to feel like I'm actively working on it.
But the moment a goal is written down, given a timeline, connected to metrics, and reviewed regularly, it changes essence completely. It becomes something that can be tracked, challenged, adjusted, and improved.
The structure makes it real.
Why Accountability Works
The most interesting finding from the research, for me, was about accountability. The act of being witnessed changes behavior.
This resonates deeply with what I've observed through The Advisory.
When founders first come to us, they know where they want to go, but they're being pulled in a thousand directions at once.
One of the first things we do is help separate distractions from the stuff that actually matters. Together, we identify the handful of metrics that are crucial for their stage of business, create systems for tracking them consistently, and establish a rhythm of accountability around the goals they've committed to.
Also, I should mention we built a software!! It looks something like this...
The ADVISORY: KPI setting
The ADVISORY: Target setting
The ADVISORY: Metrics dashboard
And just to get one thing straight...
Accountability isn't really about being monitored. It's more like knowing you'll have to show your work to someone you respect. Not because you're afraid they'll judge you, but because you care about the conversation that's going to follow.
The goal is attention.
Making the Invisible Visible
For long periods of time, founders work toward outcomes that do not yet exist. They invest time, energy, money, and emotional bandwidth into a future that remains largely invisible.
Measurement transforms assumptions into data. It reveals whether the strategies we believe are working are actually producing results. It allows us to make decisions based on reality rather than just gut feeling.
And perhaps most importantly, it gives us a way to recognize progress while we're still in the middle of the journey.
That recognition can be the exact boost of morale needed to navigate a difficult season, a major transition, or a period of growth.
The founders I've seen make the most consistent progress are not necessarily the most talented or the most ambitious (though I happen to know my clients are both). They are the ones willing to repeatedly look at reality, write things down, measure what matters, and stay accountable to the vision they have created.
What Happens Next
If you're reading this heading into summer, consider this your reminder that there is still plenty of time left in the year. The goals you set in January are not gone. The vision you had for your business is still available to you.
Sometimes the difference between reaching those goals and abandoning them isn't effort. It's structure.
The founders inside The Advisory spend time each month stepping away from the noise of the business to review KPIs, revisit priorities, pressure-test decisions, and stay accountable to what they're actually trying to build.
Three months from now we'll be heading into fall. The actions you take between now and then have the potential to dramatically change how this year ends.
If you've been carrying big goals around in your head, maybe it's time to give them a system.
The Advisory was built around a simple belief: founders shouldn't have to carry the weight of building alone. If you're ready to turn your goals into a measurable plan and create real accountability around what matters most, I'd love to support you.
