Would you like to change something in your life or the world around you? Great. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that. Learn to commit and you’ll be ahead of the curve.

If you look back at anything that you’ve deemed successful in your life, what do you believe to be the most important ingredient?

We often believe our successes are a reflection of our personal qualities or talent. And we go chasing these qualities and talents before we take on bigger challenges because we believe this is the order of success.

To have a successful career, we think we need a killer CV and some unique and rare expertise. To succeed at entrepreneurship, we believe we must be exceptionally great at what we do. To have fulfilling romantic relationships, we think we need the perfect partner.

I have learned these to be false arguments. When I witness people around me succeed with anything, the key ingredient is most often commitment – not exceptional talent. It’s the people who make a commitment to their goal and stick to it who succeed at it, whether it’s relationships, careers, health or business ventures.

The other day I met a lady, who had started her business recently and said she’s still not meeting her income goals. However, she said she keeps doing the things she believes in, even if she only has two clients because she wants to keep her momentum going. She doesn’t want the energy of giving up to interfere with what she wants to do. Instead, she’s going to put more energy into finding more clients.

I wanted to throw a little party for her right there and then. I felt like she had realised what it actually takes to achieve long-term results: commitment to whatever you’ve started.

Let’s take someone like J.K. Rowling, best known for her Harry Potter books. Nowadays, she is also an advocate for children’s rights and the founder of the Lumos Foundation. She’s also known for her active engagement in equality and diversity issues.

But did you know that Harry Potter was rejected by several publishers (12 according to many sources) before Rowling eventually got a publishing deal? In fact, one of the rejection letters she received included advice for her to go on a writing course (!) And, did I mention, that she was also a single mom living on social welfare at the time?

Many people in her position would’ve given up, forgotten their passions, and become slightly bitter at the world for not believing in them. In other words, hopeless. But it was her commitment to her craft that kept her going.

Or think about all the scientists who spend most of their careers facing errors and fixing them before they have anything slightly useful to show for their work. Like Robert Langer, the biotechnology researcher who developed the mRNA drug delivery and was one of the founders of the Covid-19 vaccine company Moderna.

I had the pleasure to interview him a while back. He told me that his bold ideas about medicine delivery via nanoparticles were initially considered foolish. Like many researchers before and after him, he was rejected repeatedly as he applied for grants for his research.

If he had given up, the world would have lost the technology that made the development of those COVID-19 vaccines a speedy process.

Hopeful people try

Success comes to those who try, not to those who give up.

Hopeful people try. They accept that there are multiple paths to their goals. They understand that no path is free of obstacles and solve problems as they arise. They are committed to their path. They look for lasting results instead of the rush of starting and quitting.

But the problem is, that starting and quitting is far easier than commitment. And hence, many of us end up making many short-term commitments instead of any long-term ones.

I personally thrive on excitement and project-based work and have had to learn the value of commitment the hard way – by realising that keeping too many doors open and options available is emotionally and energetically draining.

And the more I scatter my energy, the more scattered the impact of my actions will be. That’s why, about five years ago, I started to get really curious about the power of commitment. Since then I’ve committed to more and bigger things.

This trend has applied to all aspects of my life: from committing to annual contracts with some of my clients to starting this weekly newsletter to signing a long-term lease in a new country with a new partner – without ever seeing the apartment.

This is because I started to believe in commitment energy. Once you decide to commit to something and tell the world about it, you start investing more and more effort into these things because you’ve now told everybody you’re doing this. You succeed because you’re consistently putting in the effort and want to make it work.

And even if these commitments fail, believe me, putting your energy into things you want to happen is far more energising than wasting it in wondering whether you should commit to something or not.

**Also, commitment can spur more success and money**

Despite the slightly boring tone of the word commitment, it helps make good things great. It’s also one of the biggest differentiating factors between you and all the people who give up. Those people might be talented and brilliant and everything, but if they don’t commit to their projects, their talent might be left unseen.

For example, this newsletter platform that I publish my newsletters on, Substack, sends me emails every week congratulating me for my writing streak.

And get this: because I’ve published one of these letters every week for the last 13 weeks, I’m now among the top 21% of publishers on the platform because 79% fail to keep up with the weekly publishing rhythm. I mean, 79%! That’s a large number. And I believe this is comparable to any project in any industry. More people will always give up than keep going.

Now, only time will tell, what kind of effect my weekly commitment will have on my business in the long term. But one of the good things is that because I’m committed to this pace of publishing, I’m less bothered by how popular one single letter is and more focused on the overall impact of this letter, i.e. the relationship I can have with my readers. It’s not about one piece of text; it’s about the library of knowledge I’m creating for the people reading this and the value this knowledge has for them.

However, on a more concrete note, according to Morgan Housel, the author of Psychology of Money, commitment can also play a crucial role in financial success.

He argues that the investors who make the most money are the ones who focus on consistency rather than fast and reactive moves at any time. It may look as if someone, like the billionaire investor Warren Buffet, made money overnight by investing in something that was highly profitable at any given moment, but, in reality, they had already been investing in all sorts of random things for a long time before they once hit something big. And they likely kept their cool when everybody else couldn’t, for example during a recession or financial crisis. “A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy”, Housel writes.

How to commit – what commitment looks like in practice

To make the idea of commitment a bit more tangible, I’ve broken it down to five actions.

Practice simplicity.

To be effective, a commitment needs to be very clear. This means you have to know exactly what you’re committing to, and you have to let go of other distractions.

There’s a saying in creative work: “Kill your darlings.” This means that the closer you get to the finish line of a creative project, the more you start killing the sidetracks that seemed like great ideas in the beginning but have since become redundant. You might kill a scene, delete a quote, cut the text by 2000 characters, remove a character, etc… You get my drift.

The same applies to any project in life or career. Kill everything that is taking your focus away from the main goal unless they create some other type of immense joy.

Letting go of all but necessary will also solve a lot of your work-life balance issues.

Also, because every task, project, career, and relationship goal comes with a certain level of pain and boring tasks, the simpler your goal is, the fewer boring, repetitive tasks you’ll have to commit to and the more time you’ll have for whatever really inspires you.

Give yourself enough time.

Most people I’ve ever met through my consultancy and coaching work are great at setting unrealistic timelines. It’s amazing how common it is to lie to ourselves about how easy and fast it is to achieve ridiculously ambitious goals. I myself have also had to work hard to release myself from this type of false optimism (more on that in this post).

Now, I think it’s great to have ridiculously ambitious goals but committing to things like getting 100,000 social media followers in one night or changing a million lives in a year is not motivational to anyone.

If you’ve ever worked on long-term projects, you’ll know that most things take more time than anyone first thought and include several intricacies that no one knew about at the start of the project.

Many coaches recommend setting realistic goals and using the SMART goals framework to assess their feasibility.

After using this tool for myself and some of my clients, I’ve concluded that setting realistic goals is often a good idea. But if you’re an ambitious or creative, visionary person, you might need something a bit unrealistic to keep going.

Realistic goals aren’t always motivational. So that’s why I recommend rather focusing on your timeline.

You can achieve impossible things but they are likely going to take a lot of time and effort, a bit of good luck and help from people who’ve done something similar before.

And all of these bits and pieces take time.

So, in order to stay hopeful and not give up at the first turn, focus on yearly rather than monthly results. Move the timeline when you learn how long something will actually take so you won’t feel like a failure all the time.

Embrace deep-time reckoning and lifetime goals instead of quarterly analysis, especially if you’re working toward a big change.

Take notice of the small wins.

Because it’s so darn difficult to commit to a single thing, and many of us can find it boring and slow, you need to embrace every single win along the path to make it seem even remotely worthwhile. Keep a gratitude journal, take notice of each step forward, throw a party when you hit a milestone, and have fun while doing what you’re doing. Remember, it’s not about the destination but about the journey, right?

Focus on routine over inspiration.

When I started my career as a writer, one of my first real summer jobs was working as a journalist at a women’s lifestyle magazine.

Before this job, I had written some articles as a freelance writer and this was the first time I was assigned a cubicle at a large publishing house with my own little desk and computer. Before then, I had created this romanticised writer identity around sitting at coffee shops sipping lattes in front of my laptop so that the inspiration could run through me.

At first, I was shocked. I didn’t know how I would be able to focus on creative work in such a dull environment. So, guess what I did? I decided to learn how to do it.

It turned out that my skills weren’t dependent on the four-euro speciality coffees or the inspirational decor of a trendy coffee shop. I could get all my stories out on paper within my small cubicle of an office.

I discovered that the real trick for my inspiration was writing itself. Because I wrote, I was able to write more. And the more I wrote, the better I became at it.

Routine matters. Talent and inspiration are often the result of a routine, not the other way around.

Take care of yourself.

When we commit to things and follow routines from day to day and year to year, sometimes we make mistakes. We do things that are less than perfect. We might piss someone off. We might lose money.

Whenever one of these things happens, we need to make sure we have what it takes to survive the fall without breaking. In the end, our ability to commit comes back to our internal energy. We need to cherish this energy like a piece of 24-carat gold.

Morgan Housel uses the concept of compounding to describe the acquisition of financial wealth. It refers to the idea of choosing an asset and giving it enough time to grow. It also means protecting it from serious harm. In the financial world, this means that a person can make a variety of stupid decisions if they occasionally make some good ones, too, but they can’t be reckless and reactive with their money. They shouldn’t get carried away with debt, they shouldn’t sell their investments because of a recession, they shouldn’t ruin their business reputation, and they shouldn’t burn themselves out and quit.

The same applies to other types of projects. We can make mistakes, take silly risks, and learn from our mistakes. However, if we’re committed to something, we must protect its most valuable assets from any major harm. We must nourish it and take care of our ability to deliver it. We must make sure we’re inspired by it and create the necessary support networks to carry us.

In other words, we must take our commitments seriously.

If this post resonates with you, ask yourself: Is there something in my life that keeps me feeling hopeless but I haven’t ever fully committed to? Might this be the time for me to take it more seriously?

Become the hope you wish to see in this world.

With kindness,
Aurora

Develop this skill if you want to succeed at anything