Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

– Peter F. Drucker

Interest is reactive. Commitment is proactive.

When you’re interested in something, you might play around with it, dabble, get a feel for it, see what it can do, poke at it and see how it responds, compile and recompile, uninstall, reinstall, tweak, and spend copious amounts of free time–or copious amounts of work time–debating its good and bad points on internet discussion forums. You can run around for a long time on this treadmill, following your curiosity wherever it takes you.

If you stay interested in something long enough, without making any decisions about how far you want to go with it, you end up with a partial commitment. A partial commitment is like an intellectual fuck buddy: not quite worthy of doing when you’re sober, but a pleasant distraction from internet porn when it’s late at night and you’re drunk.

As a computer geek, I’ve probably lost months of my life doing this kind of thing. I used to spend hours on IRC and mailing lists debating the “best”: the best programming language, the best web framework, the best operating system, the best way to filter and sort email, etc. I became a collector of partial commitments. I could tell you a lot about the various things I’d “dabbled” with, but would shrivel up if you asked me to show you what I’d actually done.

I was, *gasp*, a lurker.

I had a “fear of commitment”. And it sucked.

Commitment is the realm of the doer. It implies making a decision, setting your sights on your destination, and stepping on the gas. When you’re committed to producing a certain result, you begin at the end and reverse engineer a solution that will achieve the desired outcome. You eliminate from your mind any possibility of not getting what you want. Instead of asking, “Is this possible?” you ask, “What must I do to make this happen?”

Curiosity is, of course, a good thing. It’s fun to play around with stuff, explore, break things and put them back together, and take some time to evaluate the alternatives. But at some point, the rubber has to meet the road. The warning sign of a partial commitment is guilt. When you get that sinking feeling that you’ve got better things to do than Aimless Internet Reading (TM) and IRC debate, you probably do.

The End of Lurking

The way to break out of this rut starts with learning to think more independently. Specifically, realize that “best” really means “best for you”. There is no ideal programming language, blog posting frequency, or Supreme Court ruling on the One True Text Editor. The most efficient and effective way to determine what’s best for you is to spend less time discussing and debating the alternatives and more time actually trying them out, and seeing what produces the best results for you.

Output is God.

Another thing to realize is that no matter what path you choose, you’re bound to learn a hell of a lot. A commitment to learning as much as you possibly can combined with the animal-like pursuit of a specific objective is much more important than the specific medium or tools that you use.

Finally, you always have the power of the present moment to change your mind. A commitment to diving head first into learning a new framework, language, publishing tool, or image editing program doesn’t imply lock-in. You’re much better off committing yourself to something 100% and figuring out after two weeks that you don’t really like it rather than being 20% “interested” in it for a few months, and never sinking your teeth in deeply enough to reach a firm conclusion.

So, what are you on the fence about? Ruby or Perl 6? Corporation or partnership? PC or Mac? Red pill or blue pill? Whatever it is, it all comes down to realizing that the answer is subjective, that the only way you’ll ever know is by trying it out yourself instead of relying on borrowed wisdom, and that if things don’t work out, you can always change your mind.