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.