A Contract of Perseverance

A year ago I wrote an article titled Getting Clear on 'How to Be?" inspired by a piece written by David Brooks. It turned out to be an extremely relevant and durable approach for a world forever changed by a pandemic. The guiding principles of "How to Be?" can't be sidelined by the limitations of a quarantine. As I surveyed my progress this year I found my answer to "How to Be?" endured unchanged, but that my daily living of these principles in action was mixed.

Over the holidays I read Mr. Brooks's newest book, The Second Mountain. The premise of the Second Mountain's metaphor is that fulfillment, and ultimately joy, comes from commitment (and therefore constraints). 

They're synonyms, but this idea of commitments really sinks in for me when rephrased to making a promise. So much of my "How to Be?" was really just a promise to myself. Brooks categorizes these promises into four categories: vocation, marriage/family, belief/philosophy and community. This idea resonates for me because it echoes a great lesson on perseverance I learned from both Jocko Willink's Discipline Equals Freedom, and Angela Duckworth's Grit. And what is a promise if not a contract of perseverance? 

In Grit, Angela Duckworth quotes Paul Silva, a leading expert on the emotion of interest, who says of mastery, 

"For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn't been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance." 

This is the dramatically flattened right end of the learning curve where so much experience has accumulated over years that excitement comes from the smallest changes in outcome or perspective. Olympic Weightlifters for example only have 2 motions in their sport, the clean & jerk, and the snatch. Distilled, they just pick up something heavy and put it over their heads. Yet at the highest levels of competition they may spend months (or years) training intensely just to add a half kilogram to their personal record. What if you had to work for years to lift a single extra pound, the equivalent of a paperback book, off the floor? The example is one of mastery, but in any commitment a time comes where nuance must be our source of novelty. It takes a promise not dependent on daily inspiration to sustain that focus. 

This brings us to Jocko Willink, seemingly a paragon of discipline and focus. In reality his advice on perseverance is not to "buckle down" or to follow your passion to keep you engaged. It is about making a commitment and then building it into routine. His advice, 

"Don’t worry about motivation. Motivation is fickle. It comes and goes. It is unreliable and when you are counting on motivation to get your goals accomplished—you will likely fall short."

The key to all of this is it has application far beyond goals, and can even help define how we will exist. Or to bring us back to the article I posted a year ago that has led me down this path, "How to Be?" You choose the promises that define you and you build your life around the constraints this choice implies. 

This is where my interest lies in 2021. What are the promises we make that provide the foundations for our life? Those that live beyond initial inspiration and permeate the choices we make every day. As Angela Duckworth says, 

"Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare." 

These enduring promises that outlive initial enthusiasms are our answer to "How to Be?" lived through action. 

David Brooks distills this idea to its core:

"The most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters."

My energy in 2021 is dedicated to precisely this. Making promises to build a structure of behavior (my "How to Be?") that will endure even the weightiest of trials...like pandemics, or whatever else comes our way.