Imagine your ambitions on two levels: <ol><li>A goal level, which is big-picture and abstract. It has just enough detail to inspire, but not so much that you're stuck pursuing things that don’t matter when conditions change. </li><li>Underneath that, have projects: these tend to be short-to-medium term efforts you think will help realize the larger goal.</li></ol>The flexibility of the system comes once one leg of a short-term commitment has ended. This provides an opportunity for pivoting and redirecting.

The winding path: Goals and projects 

What many people fail at with long-term commitments is that they make their initial vision too rigid. 
Flexible commitment can help overcome this by bringing together two properties. Flexibility to change the terms of your goal as information becomes available allowing you to redirect efforts and commitment to the core effort so as to not abandon your goal entirely.

Long-term flexible commitment

<ol><li>Stick to short commitments. Get good at this skill before going further.</li><li>Understand your goal at different levels. The highest goal should be fairly abstract.</li><li>Set a much more specific agenda of how I could fulfill this.</li><li>Have periodic reviews where you can change your direction and incorporate new ideas. </li><li>Don't let your reviews interfere with the short-term process of committing.</li></ol>

Walk the Winding Path

Recently, I wrote a piece about how to commit to the things you start. In it, I argued that most people are spectacularly bad at committing to things which don't have a culturally or socially-enforced system of accountability. This is unfortunate, because being successful in life inevitably depends on either doing things that weren't mandatory ...

Walk the Winding Path

How to Commit to Long-Term Goals | Scott H Young

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