Excellent results are never accidental. Without commitment, our creative powers are scattered and our ability to attract support and resources dries up. Of course, it\u2019s possible, as millions of people demonstrate, to go through life getting by without ever committing deeply to anything much at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In their insightful book, Money Drunk, Money Sober<\/em><\/strong>, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan call money (and money difficulties) the last addiction. They identify five kinds of money dysfunction, including one they call the Maintenance Money Drunk. This is a person who grows increasingly bitter or numb from the inability to pursue or even identify their dreams.<\/p>\n They write, \u201cOne of the telltale symptoms of the Maintenance Money Drunk is the phrase \u2018I\u2019m going to,\u2019 heard over and over again without action toward the goal. We often say that the greatest gift of solvency is learning how to turn a wish into a goal. And action is the difference between someone who is really going to do something and someone who is just wishing.\u201d They offer these familiar examples:<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to write a book.\u201d So write one page a day.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going back to school.\u201d So call the local college.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to be an actor.\u201d So take a monologue class.<\/p>\n It\u2019s exhausting to be a Maintenance Money Drunk and it\u2019s exhausting to be around one. Commitment is the catalyst that propels us to take action\u2014and break the cycle of apathy that keeps us stuck.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written about this before, but it\u2019s worth mentioning again because it\u2019s an essential power tool for building dreams. There\u2019s a foolproof test for commitment that goes beyond any verbal claims of commitment: look at your calendar and your checkbook<\/em>. Are you spending your time and money in ways that back up what you\u2019re truly committed to? It\u2019s only when you bring your spending into alignment with your dreams that good things begin to happen. \u00a0<\/p>\n If commitment is an on-again off-again thing for you, or if you recoil from the notion altogether, I\u2019d like to suggest you adopt an idea from the no-nonsense Barbara Sher. She asks her students to make \u201ca temporary permanent commitment.\u201d The brilliance of Sher\u2019s idea is that she reminds us that making a commitment doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re stuck forever with the things we\u2019ve committed to. For many of us, that\u2019s a huge relief.\u00a0<\/p>\n When we make a temporary permanent commitment, we give it our all for a limited period of time. I like the idea of dividing our dreams into 90 Day Projects where we focus on making progress in small, manageable ways day after day. During this time, immerse\u2014don\u2019t dabble. Treat it as a permanent commitment. At the end of the 90 days, take inventory. Want to keep going? Or have you had enough? If the answer is, \u201cI\u2019ve had enough,\u201d then design projects for the next 90 days. And so on and so on and so on.<\/p>\n Commitment gives us direction, but it doesn\u2019t guarantee ease. As Paulo Coehlo so eloquently reminds us, \u201cToo often we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that whichever way we go, the price is the same: in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dream, the difficulties that we encounter make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n