About Commitment

I have just read Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life, (Amazon affiliate link) by Eugene O’Kelly, former CEO of KPMG. As he was facing the fact that he needed to refocus his life in the light of his terminal brain cancer diagnosis, he came to the following conclusion about commitment:

“I had come to wonder about the true nature of commitment. In fact, it’s not about time. It’s not about reliability and predictability. Commitment is about depth. It’s about effort. It’s about passion. It’s about wanting to be in a certain place, and not somewhere else. Of course time is involved; it would be naïve and illogical to suggest otherwise. But commitment is best measured not by the time one is willing to give up but, more accurately, by the energy one wants to put in, by how present one is.”

I think that’s the perfect description of commitment. He covered why he came to the conclusion that commitment wasn’t the most important thing. However, to accomplish much of what we need to do and certainly to reach for our dreams, we need commitment.

There’s a lot more in this memoir but if you haven’t read it, I don’t want to give away any spoilers. It puts a lot of things in perspective. There’s a lot there that I still need to unpack and I likely will be doing so over the next few weeks or even months. It’s definitely one I’d recommend for others to read, especially those in IT.

Be an Encouragement

Back about 25 years ago, the NT 4.0 Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) was an in-demand certification. As a reward and incentive for obtaining your MCSE, Microsoft offered a TechNet subscription for 1 year. That incentive was due to end December 31, 1999. As long as one certified by that date, one would get that free 1 year TechNet subscription. At the start of December, I had my Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) certification having passed Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, but I had 5 more exams to go to complete my MCSE.

This is when my co-worker Paul stepped in. About the second week of December, he used the TechNet subscription as incentive to finish my MCSE by the end of the year. My contract with coming to an end on December 31, 1999, and I was starting a new job at the beginning of 2000. He knew I could pass the remaining exams and obtain my MCSE certification and he wanted to see me do so before I departed for the new job. He started a full press effort to encourage me to get the certification done. He had been quizzing in for a couple of months and he knew that the only roadblock was my confidence in myself. I had the knowledge. I was using it and demonstrating it every day at work.

I decided to trust that Paul saw and understood something I didn’t. I signed up for 1 exam the following week, just to test the waters. I passed that exam, leaving 4 exams to do in the last week. Would I get it done?

As the screenshot above shows, I did complete the last 4 exams in that last week of 1999. I passed 4 exams in 4 days. Each day I would come into work get my duties completed, and then head off to take the exam, and then return back to work. The whole time I was at work, Paul was encouraging. I can say unequivocally that without Paul, I wouldn’t have gotten my MCSE in 1999. It’s certainly questionable that without Paul’s encouragement whether or not I would have gotten it done at all.

Likely there are folks around you that are struggling with their own confidence about accomplishing some goal. We call it imposter syndrome now; we don’t believe we are up to the task. If you know that they can do it, be like Paul. Be an encourager. We all need encouragers. Sometimes it takes just a single person to help a person attempt and accomplish something they really want to do.

Continual Self-Improvement

I’ve taken a lot of lessons from chess. I’ve also taken a lot of lessons from masters of the game. One such master is International Grandmaster (GM) Vladimir Kramnik. In 2000, Kramnik defeated GM Garry Kasparov to claim the World Chess Champion title. He held that title until 2007, when he lost to GM Viswanathan Anand. During the period of Kramnik’s title reign, there were a lot of articles published on his life and approach to chess. Several of these articles covered how hard he continued to study and prepare, despite reaching the pinnacle of his profession. One of the reasons for his success was how much he studied. He spent hours each day looking over professional games that had recently been played. This is in addition to any work on his own to discover novelties to spring on his opposition. Sometimes his game study led to these novelties. Kramnik, at least during his title reign, never stopped trying to improve.

Another guy who is known for having obsessively trained and prepared was Kobe Bryant. One of the things acknowledged about Kobe is he didn’t have the physical skills that some of his peers did. However, he made the most of what he did have, focusing on technique and repetition to put together a Hall of Fame career. How did he get there? He got there by continually trying to improve. He talked about how much he worked on self-improvement in a TEDx Shanghai in 2016. The specific part about his practice routine and why he started so early starts about 13:50 in:

The message for us, of course, is to keep striving to improve. There are so aspects to our lives that we’ll never run out of areas to improve. Why not many of us can improve obsessively in one area like a Kramnik or a Kobe, we can still get better. The choice of whether or not to do so is up to us.

When Life Irritates Us

Seth Godin recently wrote a post on his blog titled Inverting the Vex. He briefly discusses the difference between a problem and a situation and the inherent choice we usually in either case:

If a problem is vexing us, we can use that irritation as fuel, finding the energy to deal with it. We can turn the moment into curiosity and forward motion.

And if it’s a situation? Then being vexed is a choice. If it’s helping you to be irritated, enjoy it. If not, then why bother?

Seth defines a problem as something with a solution, whereas a situation doesn’t have one. We can decide to address a problem with some sort of action to resolve it. We have to deal with situation as there isn’t a solution for us to change things. For instance, if one is out-of-shape, that’s a problem, because it can be solved. However, if one has just lost a loved one, there’s nothing that can be done to change that.

We have a choice in how we view the world and how we approach life. Even when facing certain death, we have a choice in how we handle things. Eugene O’Kelly was on top of the business world as CEO of KPMG when he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He penned a memoir about how he approached the end of his life called Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life (Amazon Affiliate link).

Like O’Kelly, we might not be able to change a situation we aren’t happy with. However, we can choose how we will respond to the situation. Likewise, if a problem is a big enough irritant to us, we can choose to take the steps to deal with. There’s a lot in life we can’t control. How we react and act towards those things is within our control.

“Fake It ’til You Make It”

One way to use the phrase, “Fake it ’til you make it,” is to pretend to be something you aren’t for the purpose of deceiving others. That’s not a good thing. But there are two positive ways to use the phrase. The first is when dealing with imposter syndrome.

Our internal belief can be at such odds with external reality that we don’t believe we are equipped or qualified to do something when we are. For instance, there’s a position we’d like to take on at work, or we might have even been asked to step into it, but we remark, “I’m not the right person for the job,” even though everyone around us is telling us otherwise. In this case, we have to work on that internal belief and one of the ways to handle it is to just go do the job. If we decide that we’re going to try and “fake it” to see if what people are telling us about ourselves is true, then eventually we should see that our own internal viewpoint is flawed and come into the position.

Another situation is when we’re trying to learn something. Dr. Henry Cloud remarked, “All learning is fake it ’til you make it.” In the below YouTube video, he talks about learning how to swing a golf club. When we first start an activity like that, we don’t know what we’re doing. However, we have to “pretend” that we do, trying to emulate what we know should happen. And typically we will fail, and fail a lot, when we are first learning something new. However, if we don’t try, we aren’t going to learn it. No one is going to download a program into our head and we suddenly know Kung-Fu, like in the Matrix. So in learning we are actually “faking it” until we “make it.”

Dr. Cloud covers those scenarios and explains it a lot better than I could. For those who might be viewing it who aren’t Christians, Dr. Cloud does quite from the Bible in a couple of places to reinforce what he’s saying from a Christian perspective, as he is a Christian psychologist, however, if you’re not a Christian it should not detract from his overall message.

Make a Big Change By Starting Small

At work, whenever we have a big project, the best way to make it manageable is to break it into smaller chunks. Maybe we call it different phases. Perhaps we don’t use the term “phase,” but we do still chunk up the work. And we continue that process until we have the work defined in a manageable way. We took something big and broke it up into smaller portions so we could understand and do the work.

This works for most things in life. Let’s say I want to make a big change. I want to be able to run a marathon. I don’t start by going out and running 26.2 miles tomorrow. Instead, I start small. If I haven’t been any type of exercise, it might be I walk 15 minutes a day, several times a week, for a few weeks. Then I slowly incorporate periods of running. And I build from there.

Or maybe I want to be able to make my own furniture. I certainly don’t start trying to build an elaborate dining room table if I have no previous experience with woodworking. My best bet is to find small, easy projects to start to develop my skills and reduce the cost for materials and equipment. As I get more proficient, I should gradually attempt more difficult projects and expand my tools accordingly. While there is a possibility I might be able to pull off that fancy dining room table, the odds are not likely to happen. It’s better to start small and work my way towards where I want to be.

If you’re faced with having to make a big change, such as getting back into shape after years of being sedentary, start small. Small changes will likely persist than making a big change all at once. It’s one of the reason dieting often fails. We can stick with the diet in the short term, but we are unlikely to do so over an extended period of time. But if we make small changes, changes that are easy to digest (pun intended), and those changes become habits, and then we build on those habits with additional small changes, we’ll eventually get to the big change we need to make. And we’ll have established the habits we need to sustain that big change. So if you’re struggling with a big change, start small.

Building in Routines for Higher Performance

Just about every resource I’ve found which covers the “secrets” of high performers points out that all high performers have their routines. These routines help them handle mundane aspects of life efficiently, which helps with their overall time and stress management. We all have some routines. For instance, for those in the workforce, there’s typically a standard time to wake-up and then a set of steps to get from laying in bed to showing up for work, even if one works from home.

The better defined our routines are and the more we stick to them, the less mental energy we have to spend planning and allocating for those aspects of our day. That preserves our mental and emotional “energy” to use elsewhere. Also, since those parts of our day are pre-planned and scheduled, we don’t have to stress over them. We just execute.

One of the most stressful periods of my life was my first year at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. It’s one of the six senior military colleges for the USA and as the name states, it’s a military college. Roughly a third of graduates go into the military; the remainder enter into the civilian workforce. Though the minority of students will serve in the military, The Citadel still puts a heavy emphasis on routines and processes. Those start the first year, what the military academies would call a plebe year, and what we call at The Citadel “knob” year. Here the term refers to the shiny bald heads male cadets get at matriculation, not the English slang definition. The picture in this post was taken during the initial week for knobs, which used to be referred to as “Hell Week.”

Knob year is designed to be challenging. Even when you are right, you are wrong. The year is designed to put knobs under stress and unfair circumstances so that they can learn to deal with those situations in a controlled environment so that they will be proficient in navigating them after graduation. Most initial military training puts the cadets/recruits/students under stress and in unfair situations. For instance, a clip from an interview with a MARSOC veteran and former drill instructor talks about each recruit have his “day” during Marine Corps recruit training (starts at 30:55 if the video link doesn’t take you directly to that part of the clip)

Part of that proficiency comes through proper management of time and stress. As such, routines are preached heavily. There should be a time to prepare your uniforms for the next day. There should be a time to attend to your personal hygiene. There should be a time to get your studying done, because it is still an educational institution. The more routines you can build, the better chance of success you have navigating knob year.

Routines help greatly when the unknown rears its head and especially when life becomes unfair, because ultimately it will.

Budgeting Our Personal Energy

Advice that’s always given towards personal finance is to understand how much money we have, where we have to spend it, and to ensure that we are spending our money based on our priorities. Folks who don’t do these things tend to struggle with their finances.

The same thing is true with respect to the energy we have to do the things we need to and want to do. Are we aware of how much energy we have and where we are spending it? Are we overspending ourselves? Are we spending it in the correct places based on what we have decided is important to us? Or are we slipping into wasteful habits with our energy, just like we can with money? For instance, something I realized I’ve started to slip back into is how much time I spend on my devices. While I am on my devices, I’m not spending that energy elsewhere, and often the energy I am spending could be put to better use. This is something Robin Sharma talks about. Here’s an excerpt from one of his mastery sessions which talks about the how and why we can get caught up with our checking our devices so much:

We should periodically take inventory about how we are spending our energy, just as we should regularly look at how we are using our money. Another similarity: there are mechanisms for increasing our energy just as their are ways to increase our income. Our health and fitness are key to our energy “income.”

Coming out of grief’s grip

From November 2020 to mid 2023, I was losing a friend, family member, or mentor at a rate of one a month. Needless to say, I did a bit of a withdrawal and rarely responded to folks beyond when I had to do so. I’ve thought of some friends who suffered with depression and while not as extreme as how they didn’t engage, I was almost there. So it’s likely all that loss put me into a minor depression as well.

I’m now beginning to re-engage with folks, and if I came across as ghosting you during that period, I apologize. It’s not something you did. Having been on the other side, I understand better how hard it is to not withdraw from the world completely. There were many days when I felt I should respond to something but couldn’t bring myself to do so.

If you’ve never gone through this, it’s hard to explain. Ive heard it described as drowning, but that’s not quite correct. The last time I was in a similar state was when I was at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics and The Citadel. There were severe family issues going on, ones which only a handful of people knew about. Both situations were filled with dealing with great pain due to circumstances outside of my control. And when we are often confronted with pain, we draw back. That’s true physically as well as emotionally/mentally.

If you have someone who has drawn away from you and you don’t know why, give them the benefit of the doubt but certainly check in on them, in person, if possible. It’s easy to ignore the email, voice mail, phone call, or text. I’ve lost friends to suicide who didn’t respond. Because they lived far away, the physical contact wasn’t possible. And how I lament that I didn’t find a way.

“Be determined and advance”

“Be determined and advance.”

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

If you’re a fan of Japanese literature, manga, and/or anime, you might notice that there’s often a common theme for the protagonist when dealing with adversity and that at some point, when they are faced with circumstances where they feel like giving up, they conclude that they must press forward, regardless of the personal cost. That’s not a coincidence, because it comes from an oft quoted part of the Hagakure, a book written to detail samurai thinking and maintain some body of knowledge of the warrior class. There are a lot of versions of the book out there, and here’s one of many: Hagakure (Amazon affiliate link).

Coming from a military background (Marine brat, The Citadel, USAF officer) this simple concept was drilled into me throughout my life. Life isn’t fair. As a matter of fact, it can be horrendously unfair. We can’t control that. We can control how we respond. And that’s the gist of the instruction. No matter what, bear down and find a way to move forward.

For me, this reminder comes into play when there’s something before me that I know is going to be painful to deal with. I’d like so much not to have to enter or continue in a bad situation, but that typically puts me further behind or the situation will just continue to grow worse.

However, it’s also applicable when things are going well and I feel like relaxing my efforts a bit. For instance, I’ve been maintaining my fitness and health program and things are positive in that direction. I deserve to be able to celebrate a bit, right? That’s all when and good if it is just that: a celebration. But when the “celebration” becomes an excuse to not do the work, to eat poorly, then I’m only hurting myself. Therefore, “be determined and advance” is the correct mindset in that situation, too.

Regardless of what you’re dealing with, “be determined and advance.” You’ll be better for it on the other side of that situation. It may require extreme discipline, but our minds are amazing. We can often do so much more that we do, if we want it bad enough. That includes the extreme discipline and determination to make it through the worst of times.