A few years ago, I stopped being accountable to myself. I told myself I was too busy. There were clients, events, a new business, a book, family obligations, a podcast. I said yes to everything except the things that kept me functional. Sleep. Exercise. Slowing down long enough to actually notice what my body was telling me.
My health fell apart. And the moment I realized my health fell apart, everything else did too. My thinking was slower. My energy dropped. My patience ran thin. The relationships that mattered most started feeling like obligations instead of the whole point of everything I was doing. I had built this life of service and purpose and then quietly stopped serving myself.
I’ve thought about that a lot since sitting down with Michelle Ly for the latest episode of Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders. Michelle co-owns Hall Roofing and Construction, The Rock Sports Bar, The Flats Round Rock, and Alcove Cantina with her husband Erik. She’s also serving her third term on Round Rock City Council, sits on multiple nonprofit boards, climbs on roofs, raises a daughter, and by her own admission runs on 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night.
What struck me most wasn’t how much she does. It was how she thinks about what she does, and why.
Accountability to Yourself First
Michelle told me she’s her own worst critic. Those words land differently depending on where you are in life. For some people, that’s a confession. For Michelle, it’s a system. She runs a constant audit on herself not to beat herself up, but to stay honest.
When she felt she was losing her edge on the YMCA board, she didn’t wait to be asked to leave. She finished her term and walked. She’s had coffee with the CEO of the Children’s Advocacy Center and asked, point blank, “Am I still effective for this board?” That’s not self-flagellation. That’s self-awareness in action.
When I stopped being accountable to myself, I stopped asking that question about anything. I kept showing up to everything and being fully present for none of it. The illusion of busyness replaced the reality of contribution.
What story are you telling yourself about why you haven’t made time for the thing you know you need most?
Accountability to Others
Michelle grew up watching her Vietnamese refugee parents give what they had, which wasn’t money. It was time. Presence. Showing up and doing the thing that needed doing without being asked twice. She said they raised her to understand that when you’re blessed, you give, even if what you’re giving is a Tuesday afternoon and a pair of work gloves.
That upbringing created something specific in her: a bias toward action over announcement. When she hears that someone needs a roof, she figures out how to get it done. She doesn’t post about it. She showed up at Philip Golden’s event and afterward sent an email saying the roof was covered. No press release. No campaign moment. Just the thing that needed doing, done.
Being accountable to others isn’t just keeping your commitments. It’s staying honest about whether your commitments are still serving the people you made them to. There’s a big difference between presence and contribution. Michelle knows the difference and acts on it.
Accountability to Community
Michelle came to Round Rock kicking and screaming. She was a teenager, uprooted, watching friends disappear in the rearview mirror. She graduated and left, like she said she would. Then she came back, because the place her parents chose turned out to be right. And now she’s on city council helping shape it for the next generation.
She told me she wants her daughter Reagan to inherit a city that’s still thriving and still feels like itself. A place where you walk into a coffee shop and recognize someone. Where a bar becomes the neighborhood’s living room. That’s not nostalgia. That’s stewardship. And stewardship is accountability on a long time horizon.
When people on city council or in the community question her motives, she doesn’t argue back. She leads by example. She carries the trash bags first. She does the thing and trusts the record to speak. That’s accountability without performance. It’s rarer than people think.
Accountability to the Business
Erik Hall is the dreamer. Michelle is the one who figures out how to make the dream run. She told me her husband builds it, she runs it. And running it means something specific: watching carefully, figuring out who’s good at what, and putting them in the right seats.
The best deescalator on her bar staff handles the customer complaints. The person who can’t manage people is behind a computer organizing reservations. She doesn’t put people in roles because it’s convenient. She puts them in roles because it’s right for the person and right for the operation. And when no one can do something to the standard she needs, she does it herself, without drama, until the right person comes along.
That’s accountability to the business. Not just meeting payroll. Not just keeping the lights on. It’s an ongoing honest assessment of what the business needs and whether you’re actually providing it, or just circling it.
In Amazon’s framework, this is about observable standards. You either have them or you don’t. Michelle has them, and she applies them to herself first before applying them to anyone else.
When One Level Breaks, They All Break
Here’s what I learned the hard way and what Michelle lives instinctively: the four levels of accountability are connected. When I stopped being accountable to myself, I became less reliable to the people around me. When I became less reliable to people around me, my contribution to community thinned out. When that happened, the businesses I was involved in felt the drag too.
It’s not four separate things. It’s one system. And like any system, when one part goes, the rest strains to compensate, and eventually it can’t.
Michelle runs on 3 to 4 hours of sleep. I’m not recommending that. But she knows herself, she knows her limits, and she knows exactly what she’s trading and why. That’s the point. Not the sleep number. The self-knowledge behind it.
The question I keep coming back to is this: which level of accountability have you quietly let slide, and what has it cost the others?
Listen to the full conversation with Michelle Ly on Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders. And if you know someone building a life the way she’s building one, the kind that serves in every direction at once, share this with them.
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