Bookish Weapon Number Two

We have all said we were committed to something. Maybe it was to get up earlier, lose weight or even more serious, stay married to someone. Keeping commitments is another story, even the ones that are more formalized like marriage. Things get in the way, like our feelings. We just don’t feel like it. We are tired so we don’t want to get up. We just get too hungry to stay on that diet. Maybe we fell out of love so ow we don’t want to be in the marriage. Bookish weapon number two is real commitment.

Real Commitment

In his great book “The Spartan Way,” Joe DeSena gives the best explanation of real commitment I have ever read when he tells the story of Japanese Tendai Monks that in order to become a monk must walk around a mountain 200 times. A higher order has to walk it 1000 times. They have been doing this for a thousand years and the monks would carry a knife with them. If they didn’t make it they would kill themselves. There were 450 monks that attempted this and only 45 did it. The rest died. That is real commitment!

Joe says, “Commitment means that you will do what you said you were going to do, even when you don’t feel like doing it. Anything less is pointless.”

What could you accomplish if you grasped this concept and made it a part of your identity so that when you made a commitment it was in stone? I bet you would not make them so lightly. You would give them serious thought, but once you committed it would happen.

The Daily Grind

Now that you understand what real commitment is all about you can apply it every day. If you say you will meet someone at a certain time, you will be there at that time. It is a commitment. If you say you are going to put in eight hours on the job, you do it. You don’t spend half of the time scrolling Instagram.

If you decide you are going to lose weight you do it. Simple! If you decide you will exercise every day, you do it. Simple! However, as you probably already know it might be simple, but it is not easy. As Jerzy Gregory says, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”