The Cost of Commitment

I once told a friend I wouldn't go to their wedding.

Not because of anything unmissable, because of work.

My mother was an immigrant and my dad was a grafter who worked from the age of 15. I learned to be grateful to have work and fermented that into making every job a vocation.

I didn't let life get in the way of the work, and a wedding, to the version of me back then, was life getting in the way.

What saved me from myself was an Exec. Someone you'd expect to applaud that kind of commitment.

He baulked at the idea of me not seeing a friend marry and said what now seems obvious. That I'll remember this wedding, and still be friends with these people, long after the project is a distant memory.

They’re now divorced but he was broadly spot on.

I have some vague memories about a short lived gameshow that’s a footnote on a wiki page. And my friend and I see each other regularly. And he remembers that I made it to his wedding 20 something years ago.

I didn’t always have a sage Exec to consult and I didn’t always make the choice I'm happy with looking back. And that’s how people you know become people you used to know. Through a thousand small unavailabilities.

The wedding skipped, the call you didn't return because you were heads-down, the friendship that turns into a calendar invite three months away.

Each one, completely defensible in the moment. It's the repeated action that takes its toll, like a stone step worn in the middle.

And the cruel part is that the thing doing the eroding is the same thing driving the success.

The total commitment that gets you up the ladder is the exact commitment that thins the relationships that could be waiting for you at the top.

I see a version of that energy now in my own kids. Nineteen, twins, both gone at life like rockets, fully in, holding nothing back.

It's a wonderful thing to watch. And somewhere underneath the watching, I wonder whether they'll know how to tell the difference between commitment that fills a life and commitment that can empty it of everything else.

I didn't, for a long time. Though I’m doing my best to make up for it now.

Who would your sage Exec tell you to get back to?

The Cost of Commitment