commitment is power

a wrong commitment is better than no commitment [42]:

photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash

Three months ago, I read a compelling essay from Sarah Wood on making the decision right. Sarah wrote about how her decision to stop seeking optionality brought about a dream life that she has not actively planned for. Since then, the topic of commitment has lived rent-free inside my head.

At work and in my personal life, I have a habit of observing and analyzing people: from their life choices, interests, and most importantly what they choose to dedicate their time to. On one hand, I have always thought that people who do phenomenal things got to where they are from a combination of intelligence, tenacity, and concentration. And that is true I suppose. Nevertheless, there is an overlooked aspect of every “success story”, the moment of commitment.

The moment of commitment to me means everything. It’s a moment that needs to happen before every venture and then throughout for one to successfully attain their goals. The moment of commitment shifts one from flirting with multiple options to eventually picking one to dedicate their efforts to.

Truth be told, I have always been an expert optionality girl: a true generalist at my corporate job, a writer who dabbles in every content creation mode until this year, a nomad who moves between four cities in the span of a year. When you want to be everything, you are nothing.

I suspect my preference for diverse and open-ended life experiences stems from the opportunity cost of commitment. I changed my majors five times before I finally picked something. Commitment is scary; commitment is limiting. If I committed to a job, that decision would close the door to potential opportunities with better learning and compensation. If I committed to living in one city, I’d be confined to what the city has to offer: people, culture, and work opportunities (unless you live in New York City)

This year particularly is the year that teaches me the most about commitment. Partly because I don’t have as many options as I used to anymore. I took a full-time job, moved to the South, and settled down. I had to do it, there was no other choice as an international graduate in America. I was no longer in school or financially dependent on my parents. I could no longer sign up for a class and drop it later if my schedule is too packed. I could no longer take internships at different companies every summer, or in my case three companies back to back.

Compared to school, the real world has more options, but it also requires a higher level of devotion. Every plan as an adult needs thorough planning, from consideration of timeline to finances. I begin to plan for my next role at work a year before that happens. When it comes to graduate school, the planning phase starts two to three years beforehand.

The upside of limitation (wrote about it here) are two-fold:

1. You become more resourceful and creative

2. Your efforts are channeled into fewer endeavors, resulting in better performance.

For instance, my desk job is nowhere near my dream job. There are days I want to throw my laptop across the room, frustrated at the thought of the more exciting things I could be doing instead. I am soon, always reminded by my mother that “You can’t have things your way all the time.”

The first six months out of school, all I could think about is optionality: a better city to live in, a more exciting job, a partner who will be “the one”. The more I am out of school and into “real life”, the more I realize all wishes like this are vain and useless. When the honeymoon phase of a new experience is over, everything gets difficult at some point. The city you dream of moving to for its impeccable summer will flaunt its dreary winter. The dream job you fight tooth and nail for might just give you nightmares about unfinished work and constant streams of demands all in the name of being trained to become the best and brightest. The person who you thought was the one turned out to have flaws like every other human being, who would have thought?

Particularly with my writing practice, I have been writing on and off since my second year of college. I jumped between multiple platforms, then multiple on-campus writing jobs. I thought a breadth of experiences would benefit me but all I really need after all is depth, which can only be achieved with commitment. The same thing applies to my job, I am wholeheartedly truly trying to spend a good chunk of time at my job before dreaming about moving elsewhere. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

If we can’t wisely pick one best thing to focus on, what could we do?

We pick one anyway and channel every fiber of our being to make it the best experience it can be.

The story of how I started this Substack closely mirrors that spirit. On a break before starting my full-time job, I started reading on substack. In February, stranded in a hotel room in Seattle due to a snowstorm, I started my newsletter and made myself promise that I would write every week. There wasn’t anything ideal or perfect about starting my newsletter at that moment. What I did was start and continue to show up for it. The more I write, the more I fall in love with the practice. I learn many a thing, and get to befriend awesome people that I wouldn’t have otherwise had I not started this newsletter. The key here is just to get started. It’s never really too late to start doing anything: learn the piano, a new language, mend your relationship with a long-time friend. There is no one magic moment to doing anything.

Committing to the wrong thing is better than standing still - Jeff Goins

While it might be true that some of us can find our “passion” early on without much exertion, most of us need to commit to doing something to find our true calling. I like this quote from an article on finding your calling by the World Economic Forum:

A vocation is not like that. It’s not something you try; it’s someone you become.

I could never be where I am today without commitment: I couldn’t have uprooted my life and moved to a different continent, finished college in Minnesota, got a job in Austin, and built a trusting social circle in a new country with English as my second language. It is just the beginning though and I wrote this essay as a reminder to myself (and to you my dear readers) to think of commitment before optionality.

The grass unfortunately and fortunately, is not always greener on the other side.

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Thank you for reading the Life with MD newsletter. If you are new here, welcome and please subscribe to join the fun. I write about the human experience and growth through the lens of compassion and curiosity. I am from Viet Nam, moved to the US five years ago, and am currently in my early 20s if that says anything about me.

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