We don’t talk enough about the importance of recommitment.
Everyone knows it can be really hard to change. There’s a reason they say that people don’t change. They technically do — it happens all the time. But behavioral change is hard. It can be a long process getting there. Lots of trial and error.
Because that’s the dirty secret about success — it rarely looks like an uncomplicated feel-good movie. Real-life success often has twists and turns. It can be ugly and punctuated with multiple bouts of failure.
Lots of people don’t envision success this way. They think it’s about committing and sticking to it once without failure. But it’s not always like that (I’d say most of the time it isn’t this simple).
Instead, success is often about recommitting. You don’t commit once and ride that one commitment to the end. Instead, life happens — you have trouble staying the course, or something comes out of nowhere and knocks you off the track. And when that happens, and you feel demoralized or humiliated, you have multiple options: You can say, “Well, I failed. It wasn’t meant to be,” and stop trying. Or you can recommit to the plan you’ve set forth.
Recommitment is a process that takes just as much steely reserve as staying the course without complication. In fact, you could probably argue, it takes more.
It takes a brave person to come back to your goals after you fail. And then recommit again when you mess up.
Choosing to try again can be one of the toughest things there is. There’s humility involved… in trying again. And again. And again.
But for many things, that’s where success comes from — not in the trying once and having it go your way. But in trying again when it doesn’t. Trying until it does.
We don’t talk enough about the importance of recommitment.