Commit Before You Are Sure

Before my first trek I was not able to run one kilometer. I booked six days in the Himalaya anyway, in the monsoon, because a friend held a slot and asked. The fitness arrived on the trail, and so did something I did not book: a person who does hard things. I walked back down as him.

I learned more about myself in those six days than in the years I spent deciding what I was. The knowing came after the deciding, and in my experience the order never runs the other way.

If you have options, this is for you. Most people with options believe the path shows up after enough searching. Try enough things, meet enough people, move enough times, and one day the right door is obvious. I believe the path is built from the doors you close, and the search is the delay.

The search is the hiding place

The belief is rational. Searching costs nothing you can see, and every year of it feels like preparation. You gather information. You keep your options open. A person who commits early looks reckless next to you.

The problem is what the search assumes. It assumes a finished self is in there, waiting for the right job or city or person to reveal it. Then the choice is easy, because by then you know who you are.

The self is an output. You learn what you are from what you kept when keeping it cost you. Until you have kept something, the information does not exist, and no amount of looking produces it.

The research on vocational callings found the clearest version of this. People who described themselves as searching for a calling reported less clarity about who they were than people who were not searching at all. The arrow runs the other way. Commit, get good, and the sense of calling follows the mastery. The searchers were waiting for a signal that only the committed receive.

Sartre had a harder word for the search. Refusing to choose is a choice. It keeps every consequence and buries the responsibility where you cannot examine it. You did not sign for the year, and you are still on the hook for it.

Options have a carrying cost

Dan Ariely was part of an experiment where people played a game with doors on a screen. Some doors paid better than others, and a door you ignored shrank and disappeared. People kept running back to prop open the worse doors. They did it after they were told which door paid best. The urge to keep an option alive beat the urge to win.

Barry Schwartz split people into maximizers, who compare every option before choosing, and satisficers, who stop at good enough. Maximizers get better outcomes on paper. They are less happy with them, in jobs and in relationships, because every alternative they inspected stays in the room after the choice.

An open option is not free. It runs in the background. Some part of your attention keeps monitoring it, and that part comes back the day you decide. People describe deciding as relief before they describe it as loss. The relief is the monitoring switching off.

Novelty has the same cost from the other side. Kierkegaard noticed that a person who feeds on new experiences ends up with everything equally interesting and equally boring. Each new thing is measured against the last one. The tenth city does less than the second did. The search spends down the one thing it was supposed to protect.

Peter Thiel has a name for the attitude that keeps every door open and calls it being well rounded. He calls it indefinite. A definite person picks one thing and builds toward it. Thiel argues that the definite person is the one who ends up with something to show. The definite person also ends up knowing who they are. That is the part the search never delivers.

The self is the output of a loop

The mechanism is a loop. You commit to something. Keeping it costs you, and the cost produces evidence about what you value, what you are good at, and what you refuse to give up. That evidence makes the next commitment easier to pick and easier to keep. Confidence comes out of the loop, and the search never enters it.

Dan Gilbert calls the second half of this the psychological immune system. Once a decision is made, especially one that is hard to reverse, the mind starts finding the good in it and stops comparing. Gilbert saw this in his own data, went home, and proposed to his longtime girlfriend. A researcher acting on his own finding is the best evidence I know that the finding is real.

James Marcia mapped identity along two axes, exploration and commitment, and found four states. Low on both is drift. High commitment with no exploration is a self borrowed from somebody else, usually a parent. High exploration with no commitment is the searcher, who has the most information and the least self. High on both is the strongest sense of self and the highest well-being he measured.

So exploration matters, and it has an end date. Exploration is a test with a result you act on. If you have explored for years and have nothing you refuse to give up, you live in the waiting room and call it research.

A second door is insurance, and nine is a residence

I wrote a letter once telling you never to bet your life on one door. Build the second answer while the first still works, it said. I stand by it, and it was written for a specific person: the one with a single bet and no fallback. A second door is insurance for a committed person.

This is for the other person, the one with nine doors and no bet. For them the doors are the place they live. The test that separates the two takes one question. Can you name the door you walk through on Monday morning, and the two you closed to walk through it? A committed person answers in a sentence. A searcher describes the hallway.

How to tell a dip from a wrong door

Every commitment has a dip. Seth Godin drew it. Excitement first, then a long trough where the work is hard and the payoff is far. The payoff comes for the few who stayed. Most people quit in the trough and go find a fresh start somewhere else, because a fresh start feels like the top of the curve. Then they hit the trough again, one door over, with a year gone.

The dip and the wrong door feel the same from inside. One difference holds. In a dip you still want to be good at the thing. The work hurts and you want to do it better. Behind a wrong door you want to be somewhere else. The work is empty, and getting better at it does not move you.

When you are stuck and cannot see the door, the instinct is to add. A new city or a new course. Asked to improve a design, most people add a piece even when removing one is the better fix. Subtract first. Cut the one or two things that take time and give nothing back, and the door that is left is usually the one.

People who back founders for a living see the same signal from the outside. Marc Andreessen says he looks for the founders who cannot not build the thing, and passes on the ones chasing an opportunity. The people who make it in low-odds fields found the thing they cannot put down, and the odds became a detail. If you have that thing, you already know it. What the search wants is permission, and permission never arrives.

If you do not have it yet, act like the person who does. Steven Pressfield calls this going pro: keep the schedule, keep the hours, and treat the craft like a job before it pays like one. Motivation is a result. The habit comes first and the belief catches up.

Close the door, then read what it cost you

Commitment costs something every time, and the cost is the receipt. When you close a door you lose the version of yourself that walked through it, and you will grieve that version. Grief here is a sign the commitment was real. A decision that cost nothing taught you nothing.

You are closer than the search makes it feel.

Name the choice you have carried the longest without making. That is the door. Close two others by the end of the month, walk through it, and hold through the first dip. At the end of it, write down what keeping it cost you and what you refused to give up. That page is the first honest description of who you are, and it is the one the search was never going to write.