Interested Or Committed? Time For A Reality Check

With so many interesting things available at the click of a button, we’ve all become multi-passionates, but we won’t get anywhere fast that way. Here’s the hard truth you don’t want to hear.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

I love that I am interested in many things. For my generation (Gen X) and the previous ones, general knowledge was highly valued. It wasn’t easily accessible so you built a library with books on various topics and visited interesting places and exhibitions.

The arrival of the Internet provided an endless source of information and pictures that blew our minds. I find it laughable that there is so much written about capping Internet time for children and teenagers when my generation spends so much time on their iPads.

Many of us became multi-passionates, genuinely interested in so many things. We want to write, paint, sew, stretch, meditate, and be mindful and spiritual. We’ve got many courses sitting in our inbox and books on our shelves to prove it.

But here is the problem: although we are truly interested, we often fail to commit.

“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”

— Ken Blanchard

Make the commitment: Say Yes and No

When we commit, we choose a path and have to ignore the other ones.

Think about marriage, you commit to love the other person and say, “I, _____, take you, _____, for my lawful wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

There’s no condition, no excuse, no ‘I don’t have the time for this marriage at the moment’, no ‘I’ll make time for my marriage when we have a nice home’, nor ‘I’m interested in this marriage but I also am interested in this person and that one’. Either you respect your commitment, or your marriage collapses. You are either in and committed or out.

Wedding vows are a great model for commitment to any goal. To say yes to this goal is to say no to anything else that doesn’t…