Commitment and ambition are not the same — and I strongly believe it’s commitment that will get you where you want to go.
Let’s define what commitment is.
Commitment is unwavering dedication to a goal, a target, to something you set out to do.
If you put a “but” next to a goal you have, that tells me you’re not truly committed to that goal. That tells me that what you have is more likely ambition.
Ambition is the desire to achieve something.
Ambition might be: “I’d really like to lose 10 pounds.”
Commitment is: “I track when I eat. I remove all the junk food from my house. I commit to an exercise plan. I get out there whether it’s cold or raining or thunderstorming. I do what I set out to do, regardless of the conditions — even when they’re not ideal.”
Doing the work is commitment. Everything else is ambition.
If you say you’re committed to your goals but you have a contingency plan in mind, I would question your commitment.
If you go into something assuming a plan B, you are doing plan A a disservice.
Of course, I don’t discount the wisdom of having additional options in consideration if your initial plan doesn’t work out. I don’t recommend betting your entire business on one idea if it’s something that would wipe you out completely if it doesn’t work out. That’s just poor decision-making.
That said, if you’re truly committed to achieving something, then you must go all in to achieve it.
I have certainly been in situations where I was fully committed to something and it didn’t work out. At Crisp, we often commit to campaigns and initiatives that we invest dollars and resources and people in. We commit to making it work out, but there will always be things outside of our control.
For example, we cannot control somebody else’s effort. We cannot control other people and what they do with the information that we give them. We can empower someone, provide the support and resources, and invest in them, but they may not be the right person to carry something to the finish line and get the intended result.
I’ll give you another example. Let’s say we’re running a marketing campaign, and we commit to trying certain strategies and allocating a certain budget to that campaign. Especially in marketing, you will never have a 100 percent hit rate where it’s going to be successful every time.
I look at that sort of scenario not as sunk costs but as research and development. While we may not always get a quantitative return on something like that, we do get valuable data back that helps us determine what doesn’t work. That allows us to pivot and make different decisions, iterating on campaigns and eventually becoming successful with them. But it’s rare that you launch a campaign and it’s successful right out of the gate, that you got everything right. It just doesn’t work that way.
But if you set out to accomplish something and right out of the gate are already thinking about all the ways it’s probably not going to work and what you’ll probably settle for doing instead, you’re telling me with your attitude and actions that you’re not really committed to that goal.
Commitment means doing whatever it takes. Even when encountering difficulties and adversity, we’re going to figure it out.
