The Reliability Advantage
dailyblog.scottdclary.com
Hi All,
Here’s my daily newsletter navigating the crossroads of business, growth, and life.
If you love this content (please share it), but also…
Start here > https://newsletter.scottdclary.com
Check out my Podcast, connect with me on YouTube / Twitter, and read my Weekly newsletter.
Sponsor: Lingoda
Look, I'll be real with you, my French used to be solid. I learned it in school. But when I booked a trip to France a few years ago, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant.
So I joined the Lingoda Sprint Challenge. And it changed everything. Live classes, five students max, real teachers. In two months, I went from bonjour to café conversations.
Here's how it works - you take 30 or 60 classes in 60 days, and when you finish, you get 50% of your money back. That works out to about $4.50 per class, which is honestly amazing for live instruction.
Go to try.lingoda.com/success_sprint, use code SCOTT.SPRINT for extra €20 off.
Listen Here:
The Reliability Advantage
Everyone's searching for the secret hack to success.
They join masterminds. Buy courses. Study complex strategies. Obsess over optimization.
Meanwhile, they're missing the most powerful advantage hiding in plain sight.
It's not talent. Not connections. Not even hard work, exactly.
It's simply doing what you say you'll do.
Reliability – showing up consistently and delivering on promises – isn't just another success factor. It's the foundation that makes everything else possible.
And in a world of ghosting, excuses, and perpetual distraction, it's become the rarest skill of all.
Let me show you why reliability is the ultimate cheat code in the game of life – and how to leverage it when everyone else is searching for complicated answers to simple problems.
The Universal Currency Nobody Talks About
Trust is the hidden currency of every transaction.
It's exchanged in every deal. Every relationship. Every opportunity.
Yet most people treat trust as an afterthought – something that naturally develops over time rather than an asset they deliberately build.
This is backward thinking.
Warren Buffett recognized this when he said: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it." What he understood is that reputation – fundamentally built on reliability – is the ultimate compounding asset.
But there's a deeper truth behind his observation.
The market systematically undervalues reliability.
Look around you. Everyone's focused on developing exceptional skills, distinctive personal brands, and breakthrough ideas.
Almost nobody is focused on becoming exceptionally reliable.
This creates a massive arbitrage opportunity. The gap between the value of reliability and the effort required to develop it might be the single greatest inefficiency in today's market.
Your opportunity isn't becoming 1% better than everyone at everything. It's becoming 10x more reliable than anyone else in one critical area.
And that begins with a simple shift in how you approach commitments.
The Commitment Revolution
Most people treat commitments casually.
"I'll try to make it." "Let me see what I can do." "That should be doable."
These half-promises create half-results.
Your relationship with your word defines your relationship with your future.
Naval Ravikant lives by a powerful standard: "If I say I'm going to do it, it's done." Not "it's probably done" or "it's likely done." It's done.
This standard seems extreme in a world where flaking has become normalized. But it's precisely this extremeness that creates extraordinary outcomes.
Think about your last 10 commitments – to yourself, to others, to your work. How many did you fulfill completely, on time, without excuses?
If it's not at least 9 out of 10, you're leaving life-changing value on the table.
I learned this lesson the hardest way possible.
For years, I was the guy with big plans and inconsistent execution. I'd start projects with enthusiasm, make bold claims, then get distracted by the next shiny opportunity. I wasn't unreliable in the obvious way – I didn't completely disappear. I was unreliable in the subtle way – consistently delivering less than promised, just a bit later than agreed.
My progress reflected this standard. Good enough to survive, nowhere near thriving.
Then I had a rude awakening. I lost a life-changing opportunity to someone with half my skills but twice my reliability.
The feedback was simple but devastating: "We just couldn't take the risk."
That's when I realized – reliability isn't just another professional virtue. It's the foundation everything else is built upon.
The Three Reliability Destroyers
If reliability is so valuable, why is it so rare?
Three forces silently undermine your ability to be someone people can count on:
1. Optimism Bias
Most people systematically underestimate how long tasks will take and overestimate how much they can accomplish.
This isn't just poor planning. It's a cognitive bias hardwired into human psychology.
You look at a project and think: "That should take about two weeks." Then three weeks later, you're explaining why you need another week. You weren't lying initially – you were experiencing optimism bias.
The solution isn't becoming more pessimistic. It's applying a reality filter to your estimates.
Whatever time you think something will take, multiply it by 1.5. Whatever complexity you anticipate, multiply it by 2. This isn't padding – it's reality correction.
2. Commitment Inflation
Modern life encourages saying yes to more than you can deliver.
Social media rewards the appearance of productivity over actual productivity. Professional cultures celebrate the person juggling multiple projects more than the person finishing one project exceptionally well.
This creates pressure to commit inflation – saying yes to more than you can reasonably accomplish.
The solution isn't becoming less ambitious. It's becoming more strategic with your yeses.
Your capacity for reliability is directly proportional to your capacity to say no to good opportunities that distract from great commitments.
3. Accountability Vacuum
Most environments offer minimal consequences for minor reliability failures.
People forgive the occasionally missed deadline. Teams adjust to the team member who's "running a little behind." Friends accept the last-minute cancellation.
This creates an accountability vacuum where small reliability failures go uncorrected until they become habits.
The solution isn't external punishment. It's creating personal systems that make reliability the path of least resistance.
Track your commitments explicitly. Review your reliability weekly. Create consequences for yourself that make reliability non-negotiable.
Your ability to circumvent these reliability destroyers directly determines your capacity for exceptional achievement.
The Silent Superpower
Reliability creates advantages that go far beyond the obvious.
Most people understand that reliability builds trust. Few recognize how it transforms your entire relationship with opportunity.
Reliability changes how people present opportunities to you.
When you're unreliable, people filter what they offer. They hesitate to depend on you for critical tasks. They build contingency plans around your involvement.
When you're reliable, the opposite happens. People bring you their best opportunities first. They structure projects around your strengths. They recommend you without reservation.
This creates a virtuous cycle where reliability generates better opportunities, which create higher visibility, which leads to even better opportunities.
Reliability also changes your relationship with yourself.
Each kept promise to others strengthens your ability to keep promises to yourself. Each completed commitment builds your identity as someone who finishes what they start.
Over time, this self-trust becomes an unshakable foundation for everything you pursue.
A fascinating study from the Harvard Business Review illustrates this perfectly. Researchers analyzed over 5,000 employees across multiple industries and found that reliability predicted career advancement more accurately than talent, education, or even initial performance.
The study followed employees over a seven-year period and discovered something surprising: workers rated highly for reliability were promoted 2.8 times more often than their equally talented but less dependable peers. Their income growth outpaced others by an average of 43% over the study period.
Your most important audience for reliability isn't your boss, clients, or partners. It's you.
The Reliability Compounding Effect
Like all powerful principles, reliability compounds over time.
The first few months of consistent reliability might generate minimal external results. People are naturally skeptical – they've been burned by initially enthusiastic people before.
But as you stack months into years of consistent reliability, something changes.
People stop questioning if you'll deliver and start building around the assumption that you will. This shift from "hoping you'll come through" to "counting on you coming through" is where the real magic happens.
Reliability doesn't add value linearly. It compounds exponentially.
Think about the people in your industry who seem to effortlessly attract opportunities. Look closely at their history and you'll often find a foundation of reliability that made everything else possible.
The expert who gets premium speaking engagements didn't just develop expertise. They developed a reputation for consistently delivering value on stage.
The consultant who commands top fees didn't just acquire knowledge. They built a track record of reliably producing results.
The investor who gets access to the best deals didn't just accumulate capital. They established a pattern of reliable decision-making and follow-through.
In every case, reliability wasn't the flashy skill that got attention. It was the foundation that made the flashy skills valuable.
Your relationship with your word is the highest leverage investment you can make in your future.
The Simple System That Changes Everything
Reliability isn't a personality trait. It's a system.
You don't become reliable through motivation or intention. You become reliable through deliberate processes that overcome human nature's tendency toward inconsistency.
Here's the simple system that transforms reliability from aspiration to identity:
1. Capture Every Commitment
Most reliability failures don't begin with bad intentions. They begin with forgotten commitments.
Create a single place where every commitment lives – personal and professional, major and minor. Review this list daily.
The simple act of seeing all your commitments in one place creates accountability pressure that motivation alone cannot generate.
2. Apply The 70% Rule
Never commit to anything unless you're at least 70% confident you can deliver it on time, as promised.
This creates a buffer against optimism bias and unexpected complications while still allowing for ambitious goals.
If you can't commit at 70% confidence, renegotiate the commitment before making it, not after failing to meet it.
3. Build Preemptive Accountability
Don't wait for deadlines to create pressure. Create artificial milestones that force early progress.
Tell someone when you'll reach the halfway point. Schedule a progress review before it's necessary. Create stakes for the journey, not just the destination.
This transforms reliability from a binary outcome (did you deliver or not?) to a continuous process of demonstrating trustworthiness.
4. Create a Personal Reliability Metric
What gets measured gets managed. Track your reliability with a simple metric: commitments kept divided by commitments made.
Review this metric weekly. A reliability score below 90% should trigger immediate adjustments to either your commitment practices or your execution systems.
This single number tells you more about your future success than almost any other metric you could track.
5. Practice Preemptive Communication
The moment you realize a commitment might be at risk, communicate it – even if the risk seems small and you believe you can still deliver.
This single practice separates true reliability experts from everyone else. It transforms potential disappointments into demonstrations of integrity.
The reliability system isn't complicated. But it's uncomfortable for most people to implement because it creates nowhere to hide from your own word.
And that's precisely why it works.
Stop Overcomplicating Success
The path to exceptional achievement isn't mysterious.
Most people know what they should do. The gap isn't knowledge – it's execution.
While others search for sophisticated strategies and secret shortcuts, you can create extraordinary results through one simple principle:
Do what you say you're going to do.
Not sometimes. Not usually. Nearly always.
In a world where excuses have become the norm and consistency the exception, reliability isn't just another professional skill.
It's the ultimate arbitrage opportunity.
The market is systematically undervaluing reliability while overvaluing nearly everything else. This creates an opportunity for anyone willing to build this foundation while others chase more visible but less fundamental advantages.
Your path forward is clear:
Make fewer, better commitments
Track them rigorously
Deliver on them consistently
Let the compounding begin
Stop overcomplicating success. Start understanding reliability's power. The gap between those two adjustments is where your extraordinary future will be built.
Thank you for reading.
– Scott