Learn the key to full commitment

It is quite obvious that success is correlated to commitment. Whether in business or in life, the more committed I am to a task, the more likely I will see success, whether it is learning a new instrument, any other skill, finding product market fit, growing a company to the next level, or a marriage.

But how do you fully commit to a task, when there are so many options? Doesn’t full commitment, doing whatever it takes, lead to burnout? Is it even healthy in a world that is constantly changing in ways that we cannot predict?

Valid questions, and I believe that the answer in both cases is: it depends.

It really depends on how well you are practiced in fully letting go.

If you want to find product market fit for your company, you probably have more than ten ideas of how this could look, so you have to let go of at least nine. Focusing on just one is probably sustainable, and practicing letting go of nine also primes you to let go of that one, if the world tells you that you were wrong about it.

If you want to grow your company to the next level, you most likely have to let go of control, delegate decisions to new hires, and get comfortable with changes in your team that you started to value. That is work. But holding on to any of these things is what can destroy you or your company.

If you want to grow or become more intimate in your relationship, you have to let go of your ego.

Actually, every serious commitment forces you to let go of your ego. If you commit to one of the ten ideas for product market fit and fully commit, telling your team that they will work on one of them, you risk embarrassment, because it might have been a choice that did not yield the results you expected. If you do anything of significance, embarrassment is actually very likely, especially in the beginning.

So, if you still have more than three ideas on the board and, after hours of meetings, still could not agree on the right one to focus on, is it really because you need more research or more data, or is it something else?

Especially if you went to school, which most of us did, you might have a problem here. Especially if you were one of those straight-A achievers. In an artificial environment such as school, you can be right most of the time, getting your As and getting rewarded for it. It feels very safe, but what does it do to you? It puts insecurity into your bones, that feeling of what would happen if you said something wrong. In fact, I sometimes wonder how many of the overachievers in school actually started out with a lot of fear, likely induced by their parents. Just a theory.

I definitely know the fear of embarrassment, because I have lived this life for a long time. It is my personal project to let go of it.

Maybe you are lucky enough and got plenty of Ds and Fs at school and quickly realized that it did not matter in real life. Then your path might be different, but I certainly had to overwrite some of my fears of saying something wrong. As I believe in embodiment, I really like martial arts for this task, especially Judo. I found nothing that more clearly overwrites my internal programming to fear doing the wrong step than flying through the air, getting thrown onto a mat, shaking myself, noticing that I am okay, and having learned something. And as a white belt, I am the one flying 90% of the time. Now that is a letting-go success rate that is really priming me for full commitment.

Reflection of the day

• Where do you have trouble fully committing?
• What story, or what part of your ego, might be in the way?

With care,

Martin