The 365 Commitment

We all have good intentions. If there were a reward for what we intend to do, then some of us would be highly decorated. Yet, unfortunately, many of our large aspirations never see the light of day. They lay dormant, quiet, with nothing but our own internal hopes and dreams to keep them company. Our most noble of intentions are just goals that are psychologically weak because they remain abstract, distant, and fleeting.

So how do you close this intention-to-action gap? How do you move from merely being aspirational to an actual practice? The first step is to name these goals, give them shape and meaning. Describe what they are and write them down. Say them out loud and commit them to both written and spoken words. If there is anything we know for certain, it is that the goal that is written down has a far greater chance of being achieved than a vague and formless fancy of your heart.

Goal-setting research over the decades has many ideas that can be helpful when we ponder how to go about achieving what we desire, but the one consistent theme is that a goal has to be specific and meaningful, and once it is given a shape, written into language, and repeated, it becomes more real. Translating your intention to action first requires the specific act of defining what it is that you want, and defining it well enough that you can articulate it with words.

If writing the goal down is the first half of the battle, converting that goal to daily action is the second. Once you know your goal and you can read it and repeat what it is because you have articulated it, the next big step is to ask yourself this question every morning: “What are the most important things I can do today to achieve my goals?” This question is incredibly important because you are leaving the world of intention and entering into daily action.

When you ask this question and make the attempt to convert your intention into daily action, then you are no longer just "doing my best" and are now finding focus with consistent daily effort. That produces a persistence that, over time, will begin to pave a path that will lead toward the accomplishment of what you have written down. This is the way, and although these two major steps may sound incredibly simple, most people do not ever take them. They remain forever on the other side of intention.

So if you wish to cross the chasm from intent to action, then first write your goals down and then ask yourself the simple question every morning: What am I going to do about it today?

I sat down this morning and had a long debate with myself. I have decided to start numbering my 365 commitment blog by the number of consecutive days rather than by the 365-day cycle. So whereas today is technically Day 1 of my next 365 commitment, it is really Day 3,199. That is what sealed it for me, one day away from 3,200. My goal is to keep this up until I hit 20,000 or die.

So I keep going; I will hit 10,000 consecutive posts on May 24th, 2045. I will be 72 years old. To hit my goal of 20,000, then I would need to keep writing these until Oct 9th, 2072. I will be a little over 100 years old then. This is possible. My grandmother, for example, is 101 and still alive today. So he did it, perhaps I can to. Of course this means I better get off the couch and stop eating processed foods and get my blood pressure down.

This is an audacious goal, and with that comes some serious commitments to longevity and health. It also requires me to up my game and be a bit more dedicated to how and what I write about. If I am seriously going to do this every day for the rest of my life until I am a century old, then I need to get dialed in, way above and beyond where I am at now.

I am sitting here writing this blog after planning my next 365 objectives. I have a core of 12 objectives for the next string of days. Track record shows I will achieve one of them, and get partially the way on the rest. So here goes. I have written my goals down, decided on what I am committing to this time and today I hit go again.

One thing stays constant, however. Every day I write and publish my journey along the way. My newfound audacious goal of reaching 20K in continuous daily writing seems both crazy and also easy at the same time. I mean, seriously, all I have to do is sit down and write my thoughts down for 20 to 30 minutes. That is not that hard, right? Then I to go through all the steps to publish it in all the various forms (video, audio, text, etc). I am generally bad at all of the above, but I sort of wonder what kind of incremental improvement I will make over the next four or five decades?

What can we get really good at if we just simply persist? Just start and keep going every day. What will happen? Is it worth finding out? Is there something that you want to be really good at? Then I think you might ponder what you can do every day until you are 100. My grandmother made everyone breakfast and pulled weeds every day. Is she a pro at that? Probably not, but I think we all love sitting around her table eating that one egg and piece of toast she is famous for.

So here is to my latest round of commitments. A new start to the 365 commitment, but this time it is more ambitious. 3,199 down and 16,801 more to go.

You might have seen the movie Obsession recently. I will not spoil it for you, but it is a classic story of a young man using a talisman to get a wish granted, and he wished for a girl to be obsessed with him. Of course, this backfires, and he gets what he wanted, but the mechanism by which he gets it is at a terrible price. I was reading about the creation of this movie and the director acknowledged that the idea came from a Simpson's episode called the Treehouse of Horror. I do not remember seeing that, but let me guess: it's a classic monkey's paw story.

The term comes from “The Monkey’s Paw,” a 1902 short story by W. W. Jacobs. Here is the beginning of that story:

An older couple, Mr. and Mrs. White, live with their adult son Herbert. A family friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, visits them after serving in India. He has a strange object with him: a dried monkey’s paw. The paw has supposedly been enchanted so that three different people can each make three wishes. But Morris warns them that the magic is dangerous. His point is essentially that people should not interfere with fate. Mr. White gets the paw anyway. For his first wish, he asks for £200.

That seems harmless enough. The next day, Herbert goes to work at a factory. Later, representatives from the company arrive at the White house. Herbert has been killed in an industrial accident. The company says it accepts no legal responsibility, but it offers the family a payment as compensation. The amount is £200. So Mr. White got exactly what he asked for. Just not in the way he imagined. That is the core of the Monkey’s Paw idea.

The story continues; I will not spoil the ending. You need to read it yourself - then suddenly you will understand just how many movies and shows you have seen over the years tell this same story, but just in different ways and with different dilemmas. However, my purpose here is not to teach you about overly used plot types in modern cinema. Rather, I am reflecting on my last day of the latest round of my 365 commitment.

Every time I do this, I pray for and identify something that I am trying to achieve. It is sort of a bargain, if you will. I will commit to a few core habits for 365 days in a row, and in return I will get some great favor, if God decides to allow it. To keep my humility in check, I always say, but if not, after that bargain. I will win this great boon by keeping this commitment, but if not, I will do it anyway. I know. I know. Don't get after me about this; I realize how silly it is and how presumptuous it is, but it has been working rather well for me, so I stick with it.

Every year, I have had amazing success. I completed a marathon, then a 50-mile marathon, then got a job that I wanted, and was able to achieve a few personal goals that I had been working on for years. All great things, and consequently, I always make this commitment in earnest. Except for this last year. I half heartedly made a commitment, and I half heartedly considered what I wanted to achieve. The funny thing is that I got it! However, it was not quite what I wanted, and it came with consequences. I got a monkey's paw.

Which leads me to this conclusion on the last day of this round of the 365 Commitment. Commitments and personal contracts are serious business. Tread lightly when you decide to make them. Do not just put one foot in. Go all in and make the commitment stick. When I have done this in that manner, the dividends have been amazing. When I go in with a lazy attitude, then I get unpredictable results.

Should you draft a line-by-line contract with stipulations and exit clauses for God to consider in your prayer? No. But I can tell you this much: you need to take your end of the bargain seriously, and God will never fail to deliver. Chances are you will be provided with much more than you deserve.

We all can recall with trepidation the last question on the math test; it was always the dreaded word problem. Most of us just immediately folded. The one brainiac smart girl in class had learned how to convert key phrases back into the required equation and found the word problem to actually be really easy. The one recluse kid in the back corner of the classroom could solve that problem without even writing anything down and, in fact, would refuse to do so because it was boring. So, out of a class of 25, two kids could solve the problem, but only 1 would get an A. Try as she might, and even though she explained the exact scenario using different characters, she could not get anyone in her class to be willing to even attempt the word problem. Most would just punt at the first sight of something that required any ounce of reasoning.

Nowadays, math classes are really pushing this concept. This is probably a good thing, although I am not sure about the methodology. Our children bring home a packet of complex word problems, scenarios that the young person has to figure out or fail on the pending test. As usual, the parent finds out about this the night before, and thus we find ourselves trying to explain how the word problem works. We are paying for the years in which we refused to do any word problems; now we are doing them at night with our kids.

It is almost as if that smart girl grew up and became an official in the state K-12 administration and fought hard to adopt a 100% word problem curricula to seek revenge on her 28 other classmates in high school algebra. Julie, please forgive me for shooting spit wads into your hair while you were finishing the math test. For the last time, I apologize. You can stop tormenting us now with your continuous production of word problems in your revenge plot.

There is a difference between procedural competence and conceptual understanding, and this is what the modern word problem is trying to achieve. Our children have the same reaction we did, which is the immediate recognition that conceptual understanding actually requires us to think and, like it or not, our brains are wired to avoid that level of thinking unless it is required for our immediate survival. Unless, of course, you are the black leather jacket, long-haired boy in the back of the room who was born with a passion to disregard all procedures in life and therefore wholeheartedly embraces high-order thinking.

A person can become very good at a procedure while still being unable to explain the underlying idea, adapt it to a new situation, troubleshoot when it breaks, or teach it to someone else. A good test of whether you have actually learned something is whether you can do four things: explain it in your own words, apply it in a different context, recognize when it does not apply, and modify the approach when conditions change.

I tried to explain this to my daughter last night; she just rolled her eyes, put her earbuds in, and said, "Dad, can you just give me the answer? The teacher is letting us use notes."

Thanks, Julie. You got me to do my word problems. When will the torture end?

I have noticed that one of the things that creates the most stress for me is simply thinking about everything I have to do. It is not necessarily that any one of those things is overwhelming. The problem is that when I think about all of them together, they begin to feel like one enormous responsibility that I am somehow supposed to be managing all at the same time.

There is work that needs to be done, people I need to talk to, family things I am thinking about, decisions I need to make, unfinished projects and things coming later in the week. None of this is unusual. This is just modern life. We carry around an incredible number of open loops, and technology has made it possible for almost every part of our lives to reach us at almost any moment.

Anyway. What I have found helpful is deliberately compartmentalizing my world.

When I am about to enter a meeting, work on a project or spend time dealing with one particular area of my life, I remind myself that for this period of time I am only responsible for this one thing. I do not need to solve everything else right now. In fact, I could not solve everything else right now even if I wanted to.

For the next hour or two, I have a role. I have an area of my life that I am working in, and I usually have a reasonably clear idea of what a successful outcome looks like.

There is something comforting about that.

Instead of thinking about the entire collection of things I need to accomplish, I can reduce my world to the engagement directly in front of me. If I am meeting with someone, perhaps my job is simply to understand their perspective and strengthen the relationship. If I am working on a project, perhaps the goal is to get one particular section completed. If I am spending time with my family, then that is where I am.

The other things have not disappeared. They still matter. I am simply recognizing that they are not actionable at this particular moment.

I think this distinction matters because worrying has a way of disguising itself as responsibility. If something is important, it can feel irresponsible not to be thinking about it. The result is that we think about work while we are with our family, think about family while we are working, think about next week while dealing with today and think about several problems while actually solving none of them.

We end up carrying the emotional weight of ten things while only having the capacity to act on one.

Compartmentalizing has helped me separate those two things. And you know what? It works. I can care about something without giving it my attention right now. I can know that another problem exists and still decide that it belongs in a different part of the day. I can even be worried about something and recognize that thinking about it during the next meeting will do absolutely nothing to improve the outcome.

For me, it helps when the compartment has clear boundaries. I know what role I am playing, what I am trying to accomplish and approximately when that engagement ends. This turns something vague and overwhelming into something I can actually deal with.

Come to think of it, when I think about everything at once, I can quickly convince myself that I do not have enough energy, time or attention to manage it all. That may even be true. But the fact is, I am not actually being asked to manage it all at once.

I only need enough energy for what I am doing now.

Our lives have become increasingly bad at creating these boundaries for us. Work, family, news, messages, finances and everything else arrive through many of the same devices and occupy many of the same spaces. There are fewer natural walls separating one part of life from another, which means we increasingly have to build those walls ourselves.

I am beginning to think that this is an important skill. Compartmentalizing is sometimes described negatively, as though it means avoiding reality or refusing to deal with difficult things. I think it can mean almost the opposite. It allows me to give something my full attention because I have temporarily stopped asking my mind to carry everything else along with it.

The world can feel pretty overwhelming when I try to hold all of it in my head at once.

It becomes much more manageable when I decide which small part of it belongs to me right now.

I came across an article today by Susan Emerson talking about the difficulties of being a new mother. This can be an incredibly trying time for a young woman who is suddenly put in a situation where coping skills are highly valuable. The premise of this article is that it is wrong to believe people either have this skill or do not; that it is a trait. So to say, I just do not have the ability to cope, or I just cannot handle this, is incorrect.

When we had our first child, I was an absentee dad. I did not intend to be that way. I truly wanted to be part of the whole experience, but I naturally felt the best thing that I could do was to provide for everything that was needed. I worked harder, took on more work, and focused on bringing in more. Consequently, I got stressed out and overwhelmed, and the times I was around and available, I was mentally exhausted. I did not know or understand how taxing it was for my wife at the time to be dealing with a new baby all day long. She had yet to build her portfolio of resilience.

Years later, we would have our third child. This time I was around a lot more. I had learned my lesson that my presence was more meaningful than the extra income. Helping out meant much more than changing a diaper now and then. So I did better, but what changed is that my wife was far more resilient this time. She had built a lifetime of strengths and tools she could utilize both within herself and externally where she needed it. I was a better help, true, but my wife was far stronger than she was when we had our first child.

So this article rang true to me, because I have seen this concept manifest in my own life and the significant magnification of resilience my wife was able to demonstrate over the course of a decade raising our children into their teen years. Indeed, the correct way to look at this is not that coping is a trait that you have or do not have; rather, it is something you build over time. So the analogy of a portfolio is a good one; you have a body of work over time that shapes your ability to handle tough circumstances.

This is hard for a young woman to see when she is dealing with a crying infant that is clinging to her all day and the vitality of another human being completely dependent on her making competent decisions while also being sleep-deprived and most likely malnourished because just finding time to eat is a monumental effort. She stares in awe as her mother or grandmother swoops in and handles this baby with the ease of a wise shepherd in the fields with an errant lamb. If she could only rewind time and see her own mother collapsed, weeping on the kitchen floor because the baby finally fell asleep and she now had enough time to just cry.

This is a powerful concept to remember because it applies to much more than motherhood, even though that is probably the best example. We all need to build a repertoire of resilience over time that can serve us in our many capacities in life. A first-time startup founder could feel almost like a first-time mother, trying to get a new company off the ground and survive on its own. So if you are struggling, really struggling, and you are not coping well at all, keep this in mind. If this is new for you, the struggle is absolutely real. Nobody denies that; just remember that your resilience is a portfolio that you build over time. No one starts out being automatically resilient.

When I was younger, I had a steel-trap brain. I was wickedly smart and remembered every little detail. This superpower came in handy. Everything from system admin command-line details to the day's grocery list. Now that I am getting older, that trusty recall capability has started to fail me. It is unsettling to suddenly realize that I cannot remember every detail. I have to write things down or find a way to keep track so I don't find myself drawing blanks at the wrong time. So is my brain just getting old?

Recent studies suggest it's less about getting old and more about changing jobs. When you were younger, capturing details was an important part of the job. However, as you get older, your brain may shift toward more important tasks. Healthy aging may shift cognition away from preserving every detail and toward extracting meaning, judgment, and transferable wisdom. Recent research from the University of Arizona by Fabian-Xose Fernandez and colleagues has introduced an adaptive aging concept. They theorize that healthy aging includes this exact shift in focus away from the brain's frontal systems and toward areas that need more integration.

So there is still hope for me. What I need to understand is that I am finding it difficult to recall details with the same capability as my younger self, not because something is wrong, but because there is a natural cycle going on as I get older. I am being drawn away from the technical minutiae that have been part of my entire life toward higher-order things that imply more meaning and purpose.

The important point is that perhaps I should focus less on holding myself accountable for consistently collecting and learning facts. That consistency can mature from collecting more facts to transmitting what matters. So rather than being discouraged about losing mental power, I should instead be listening to what my brain is encouraging me to do. It could very well be that my mind knows what it is good at and I am being slowly guided in that direction.

Ah, that feels better. Now, if I could only remember what I was supposed to be working on today?

In my early days of college, I had a pair of humanities teachers who could tie pretty much anything in life back to Greek writings. They'd say something like, "Well, if we look back at what the early followers of Socrates had to say on this matter..." One day, they thought it would be a great exercise for us to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, as a class. Fun times, to say the least.

In this writing, Aristotle observes the highest human good, which he calls eudaimonia. The concept is that human good can be defined when our activities align with the virtues we cherish. So when we do things that align with our values, we are doing good, and in Aristotle's mind, that is the highest order of good.

You might have heard the phrase that one swallow does not make a summer. Meaning, the sight of one of these birds does not mean summer is upon us, but hundreds of them do. Apply this to your actions, and the concept makes sense. You are not good just because I am looking at one action, but because of a series of actions over time. That is what provides the person with evidence that they have achieved this eudaimonia.

This helps us understand what it takes to feel genuinely happy, rather than just experiencing a temporary feeling of pleasure. Happiness seems to be a general sense that your life is good, worthwhile, and sufficiently aligned with what you value. A wealthy person who has money to burn and spends it on a constant source of pleasure will eventually become despondent. They will start to seek real happiness once the allure of satisfying the need to just feel good is gone.

Aristotle cared less about whether you felt happy in a particular moment than about whether you lived well and did well over the course of a complete life.

So, when we talk about living well, it's not just about chasing fleeting highs or avoiding every bump in the road. It's more about finding that rhythm where what you do, day in and day out, really clicks with what you believe in. It's about building a life that, when you look back, feels yours and full of purpose genuinely, even with all its messy bits. Maybe it's about seeing those moments of struggle not as roadblocks, but as essential parts of the journey that make the good times even richer.

Having an opinion is a cognitive trait we usually admire, especially when it's grounded in evidence. However, being opinionated is different. This usually refers to people who hold opinions strongly and frequently and tend to push them on others. So when do we cross this line? What social dynamics are at play?

Conversation depends on a kind of reciprocity. A back-and-forth, and we tend to like the game evenly matched. We expect people to say what they think, but also to remain open to what others think. An opinionated person is perceived as having moved from:

“Here is what I think.”

to

“Here is how things are.”

Strong opinions can signal certainty beyond evidence. We tend to admire conviction when someone has earned it through expertise or careful thought. But when someone seems equally certain about everything, certainty starts looking like arrogance. The problem isn't the strength of your belief; it's your unwillingness to update it.

Another reason people put you in the opinionated camp is that you express your opinions frequently. Someone who has a forceful position on politics, restaurants, parenting, software, movies, how you load the dishwasher, and the correct route to the airport can become exhausting. Their opinions begin consuming conversational space.

The lesson is that a strong, well-informed opinion doesn't have to be received negatively by others. The point is that you need to deliver this appropriately. “Opinionated” tends to be used when the observer thinks the expression of the opinion has exceeded what the situation calls for.

Know what you think. Explain why. Act on it when necessary. But remain genuinely interested in evidence that might change your mind. That combination tends to be perceived not as opinionated, but as good judgment.

A person or group doesn't become legendary simply by doing something impressive. Other people have to keep telling the story, and that retelling becomes the legend. History may be what actually happened, but legend is what people decide is worth remembering.

If you extend this concept over a few hundred years, history no longer matters. Essentially, if no one remembers it, then it might as well have not happened, at least in the eyes of those who are alive at the moment of the telling. Extend that over thousands of years, and only the legend remains.

Think of the story of Noah and the ark. Did that actually happen? Was there a flood? Was Noah a real person? I would venture to say yes, and I would be inclined to believe there was a real person and that some event occurred. I would also be willing to say Noah was probably a gifted individual with unique characteristics. However, it is also equally true that his deeds got exaggerated in the retelling. Oral and cultural transmission produced a need to place this remarkable character in a magnificent story, and so that is what happened. Then cultural and symbolic meaning was introduced, and all of this happened because some great Hebrew scholar, perhaps even Moses, decided to write the story down.

Then you ponder: is the story true? That is entirely the wrong question because thousands of years of humanity is not capable of delivering up historical accuracy; it is only capable of producing a story, and that one will always be rooted in legend, at least the ones that survive. So the real question is: what is so meaningful about this legend that humans felt so compelled to hold onto it for so long? Why did they create this legend in the first place?

Consider your own family. What legends do you have? We have several, and it is really interesting to consider how they got created and why they were passed down. I have noticed that some are growing dim, while others are starting to emerge. It's fascinating what we remember about our own families as generations pass by.

Which leads me to the final conclusion. As I look over the many decades of my life, I wonder what parts of my life would even be considered legendary? Or at least a story the next generation would be compelled to remember, exaggerate, and embellish as the years roll along. Not sure; I might have one or two, but perhaps this is an opportunity to find something that I could do with the last half of my life that might be considered legendary in some fashion?