Commitment Makes Everything Easier

I’ve recently thought a lot about commitment, probably because of the hassles of trying to make plans for my post-graduation life. I realized it’s difficult for me to make a decision about where to live and things like that not because I simply suck at decision making, but because I’m afraid to commit.

To dig deeper into the issue, maybe I’m afraid of missing out (FOMO). I keep thinking of the perks and downsides of different places and go into endless comparison cycles in my head. This place is cleaner, but this place has better location. Well, what’s more important to me? Eh, both… and then I simply decide to not make a decision. This way of living wastes my time, energy and is just not fun.

However, I have realized that commitment makes everything easier.

To give you another example, when I’m sitting at my desk, trying to get some work done, I can get distracted by a million different things. And I can often think of some reasons to not finish what I started minutes ago. Maybe there’s a better time to do this, maybe some other thing is easier to get done… But I would end up not finishing anything. However, I’m sure all college students have found and utilized the power of deadlines. It’s so much easier to get into a state of flow when a paper is due the next day. Reason? Well, it’s because we’ve finally committed. We simply have decided we will get the paper done no matter what and we’ve told our brains that there’s no excuses anymore. Then we become productive, very, very productive.

Commitment simply tells you that there’s no going back. There’s no additional calculation of the necessity of doing something, but simply pure dedication on how to make it work. This way of thinking helps us focus all our energy on solving the problem, instead of coming up with ways to hide from it.

So next time, when you find yourself highly unproductive, wasting time, or have too many thoughts and not enough actions, simply commit to something. Stick it out. And see what happens.