Commitment Saves Energy

In our personal development it’s perfectly normal to want a lot of things. We want to improve our health and energy levels. We want to be more productive and get more of the right things done in less, so that we can be more present in our personal lives. But just because you want something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

The best step forward to actually getting what you want is being committed to it. This means that you’re prepared to make sacrifices in the pursuit of making something a reality. Being committed sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but against the alternative it’s not as much as you’d think.

If you’re not committed, then you’re just interested. It means you’d like that something happens but you haven’t dedicated yourself to it yet. And this space is extremely inefficient.

Rather than putting all of your energy and attention into the thing itself, you spend it thinking about if and how you're going to do the thing. Energy gets wasted by indecision, hesitation, and negotiation. It’s like getting to a fork in the road and not making a decision about which direction to go. That thinking time could have been time spent on the road itself.

I’m not suggesting you make a rushed decision, but in most cases we spend way too much time evaluating our options rather than getting started and learning along the way.

When you make a commitment, you make a decision. Etymologically to ‘decide’ means ‘to cut off’, so commitments are just as helpful at eliminating options as it is aligning with them.

And primarily, what you cut out is all the wasted energy of wondering what you’re going to do about something you want and just getting started with doing it.

So to accelerate you forward, you can leverage a commitment device. Take decisive action in such a way that it commits you to a path.

This is exactly what I did when I finally committed to writing my book, telling a mentor the date that the first draft would be done by. No longer was I debating if or when I’d write my book and channeled all of that energy into doing it!