The Edge: Making and
Keeping Commitments

Moe Rubenzahl, Phoenix

What’s the difference between 99% and 100%?

When you are living life on the edge, math warps. In that world, the difference between 100% and 99% is the same as the difference between 100% and 10% or 100% and 99.9999% — it’s infinite.

For me, college was 100%. There was never the slightest doubt that I would graduate in June of 1974. I saw people quit, I saw some flunk out, I saw some postpone, and had no criticism of their choices. But never at all did the possibility ever come up for me that I would be anywhere else but graduation on that June day. It wasn’t that I was refusing to quit — the possibility never entered my mind, even for an instant.

It was life on the edge, a peak experience and it made me a different person.

I’ve had others since then. Grad school. My first engineering design project. My first management post. NoM Chief. Uncle of the first Journey of Initiation. Peak experiences defined by the 100% certainty of heroic completion.

Chief Jerry has called for NoM 2000-2001 to be about the edge and we have supported him in this stand. Now we get to go there.

How? The vehicle that takes us there is commitment.

The technology of commitment

People are often looking for the magic secret to happiness or success. And the muse always tells us, enigmatically, that the magic secret is that there is no magic secret. Well, maybe there is. The magic formula I use is:

Make commitments
Keep your commitment
Acknowledge your results
Repeat step 1.

Step 2 is the visible one, where a lot of people know they mess up. But steps 3 and 4 are the silent killers — the necessary steps that are often overlooked.

Defining commitment

How about another magic secret?

These are the rules for commitment. Run any commitment you make past these rules and you will know whether this commitment takes you to the edge.

A good commitment is doable. Do you know people who make outlandish, flashy commitments but never land any? This is a way to pretend you’re on the edge. When you fail, you can always say that it was impossible.

A good commitment is a stretch. Making a weenie commitment is worse than no commitment at all. It’s like arm wrestling a skinny kid: If you win, who cares, and if you lose, you really feel like a loser.

How can you tell if it’s a stretch? Think forward and imagine you have done it. If you feel a great win then yes, it’s a stretch.

It’s measurable. You need an absolute-for-sure way to know you have won or lost. If you don’t, it’s easy to bend the results andpretend you won.

Sometimes this is very hard and takes a lot of creative thought. I have never seen a commitment that could not be measured.

It’s public. If you want this to be life on the edge, make your commitment public. It’s not about motivation, credit, or shame — it’s about sharing who you are, sharing your quest, and ultimately, sharing your win, to empower those around you.

It also helps them help you and makes your learning process theirs.

This year, I resolved to make my handwriting legible. It was a nice little idea, until I told my friends, my family, and everyone at work. Now everyone gets to play and to learn from my process. And I am less likely to shirk.

A way of life

Remember step four — "repeat step one?" By repeating high-quality commitments, you build a life-affirming habit. That’s why I was so thrilled with Chief Jerry’s stand. We get to focus on it for a year, long enough to entrench a habit.

How am I doing?

Step three is to acknowledge. This means to look and tell the truth about the results. The trick is to do this without making it "good" or "bad." Acknowledge — don’t judge.

The best way to do this step is with a public declaration, to the same audience with which you shared the original commitment.

Creating a circle

And there is really a fifth step — an even higher level to play. That is to support others to commit. For me, this year is about commitment for me and for you — no foolin.

This is an opportunity to make commitment a way of life for me and those around me, and to be supported in it by men I trust. Of course, this means I have to live on the edge around the whole subject of commitment. And if I do it well, you will support others and they will support others. And all around me will support me as well, creating a circle of committed people around me.