The conundrum of commitment

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well hello, this is The Daily Five with Aurooba. That's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] I've been thinking about mental toughness and commitment lately. The other day, this thinking and reflection had me declaring to my team that if we keep saying we want to do better but never do it, we might as well stop saying it. In some circles, this is called the complete or kill mentality. It's either important enough to do, or you get rid of it.

[00:00:40] And yes, if you're wondering if I have a habit of making point blank statements, I certainly do, in all arenas of my life. They are an excellent way to give people something to react to. Sometimes, I do it just to see where the other person stands. Yeah, morally speaking, it's probably a bit of a gray area technique, but it works.

[00:01:02] Anyway. As a person with a million ideas at any given moment, with more generated every single time I work on something, I have a lot of loose ends in my life. There was a time when I was okay with this, but the more I think about what a meaningful life is. How to craft it and to make it better, the more frustrated I am with the loose ends of my own making.

[00:01:28] Lots of people are idea people like that and have loose ends. And therefore, lots of organizations reflect that in their own systems. If you've ever read that book about the five dysfunctions of a team, or heard anything about it, this is lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and, I believe it's called inattention to results, all rolled into one, making for a bunch of catastrophes waiting to happen, mini earthquakes happening so often you never have a chance to properly rebuild.

[00:02:00] I digress. On an individual level, this lack of commitment and constant creation of loose ends stems from a lot of things. But I think one of the bigger drivers is that thing with that popular acronym, FOMO: the fear of missing out. We're not always willing to pay the price of commitment, which is saying no to other things available to you, and things you don't even know about yet.

[00:02:29] We become so focused on what we lose by making a commitment that we forget what we gain by doing so. If you commit to nothing, you're distracted by everything. If you focus on everything, you accomplish nothing. You can change your mind, you know, that's something I think we all forget about when we're thinking about commitment.

[00:02:52] If you give something a real go and it doesn't work out, you are allowed to change your mind and commit to something else. Commitment means giving it a reasonable try for a reasonable amount of time. And I think for things that really matter, the amount of time is probably a year. That's enough time to get started, experience that slog, get good enough at something to be able to reap some value and see it from a few different angles.

[00:03:22] So, you know, give it a year and then reassess.

[00:03:27] Much like you, I imagine, I have proof of what true commitment can do in my own life. True commitment to consulting, for me. True commitment to a partner. True commitment to buying an actual home. True commitment to weightlifting. And yet, right now, maybe you feel the same way, I feel like I've tied myself to so many things that I can't actually make any progress because I'm being pulled in so many directions.

[00:03:58] Oh dear. I just realized I totally switched metaphors because I first described this as loose ends. But I'm gonna guess you know what I mean. So I guess the question I'm thinking about, and the question I'm asking you to think about, is what are you going to commit to? What do you want to commit to? And what will you ruthlessly cut out of your life to make room for that commitment?

[00:04:28] Because you can't do it all, certainly not all at once. And you're going to have to drop something if you want to make real progress. So, what is meaningful enough that in order to do it, you'll stop doing something else? What will you commit to?

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening! Same time tomorrow?