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The Word “Commitment,” And Its Applications Professionally And Personally
About a month ago, I had this idea to do a series on Medium where I took seemingly big, important words in the English language and tried to “define” them, insofar as my definition of them would even remotely matter. I still haven’t launched this idea, although I suppose this post is a semi/soft launch of the concept. I want to talk about the idea and the word “commitment.”
This started germinating for me because I had a friend (a 42 year-old male with a friend? Gadzooks!) who said his boss was souring on him — after about 1.5 years of work — because his boss thought he “lacked commitment.” When my friend, who has one kid and another on the way, lamented this boss situation to me, he brought up the point I often go to as well: professionally, “commitment” is contextually and semantically similar to “buy-in.” Phrased another way, if you are higher up a chain and get more out of a company, it’s logical you’d be more committed to that company. If you’re still a peon worker or execution-level, I don’t think any true “commitment” is really expected of you beyond daily and weekly task completion.
Obviously this is where it starts to get complicated, because now we need to think of:
- What is “commitment,”…
