The committed

Chapter 61

John Assaraf: “If you’re interested, you’ll do what’s convenient. If you’re committed, you’ll do whatever it takes.”

This is a fine way to word-smith the difference between convenience and commitment. Mere interest in an activity or subject or cause is rarely enough for anyone to take the time and make the effort to dig in deep, to sweat, to sacrifice, to give everything or to show up every time. Mere interest is firmly entrenched in convenience and ease. As long as it is easy, they (or we) might keep coming back. Barriers are real, but they are not all created equal. I understand trying to remove the barriers that prevent people from making deeper commitments to a cause or an event. 

You will have to bring the barriers down to the convenience level of the most averagely interested person. Those are fairly low barriers and few important things in life have such low barriers. Notice that I said important things in life. And that is where this whole issue pivots. If you are only “interested” in the subject at hand, and you are only going to do what is convenient, then it is not a very important thing . . . to you at least. Now that does not mean that it is not an important issue, I work on many things that are super important to me and others, human trafficking and conflict mining to name two, but I promise you that they are not important to most other people. I can’t get them involved at any level. There is no convenience level of engagement when you are dealing with threatening and difficult situations like human trafficking and conflict mining.

I choose to spend my time with the committed.