The Weight of Your Word
Your word creates reality. When you declare “I will,” you forge a contract with the future. What that contract is worth — well, that’s entirely up to you.
I’ve met a lot of folks who treat promises like so much confetti. They sprinkle them around carelessly, creating a fog of maybes and intentions, good and bad. But they’re not worth much.
We live in the age of oversold, overblown promises. Political candidates make them. CEOs make them. Towering edifices to what could — and yet, so often will never — be. It’s performance, to a degree. It’s all an act, and we know it, but we keep watching all the same.
It’s not enough to be a car company. We have to promise the moon. Or rather, Mars and Robotics and AI. It’s not enough to bring down the cost of living. We have to promise a new golden age.
The people I listen to — the ones I respect — are quiet in their pursuit of grandeur, stoic in the scale of their promises. They don’t tell you what they’ll do and be in 5 years. They say what they’ll do right now, in this moment, when it matters. This isn’t weakness, and it’s not a deficit of ambition — it’s precision. It’s understanding the difference between what you can promise and what you can’t.
Look at any enduring relationship, whether personal or professional. Strip away the complexity, and you’ll find a core of kept promises. Not grand gestures or elaborate plans but the steady accumulation of followed-through commitments.
The formula is ruthlessly simple:
1. State what you’ll do (only what you control)
2. Do exactly that
3. Report back on what you did
No hedging. No excuses. No blame-shifting.
When you explicitly outline your process and own your commitments, you create a map others can trust and follow. When things go wrong — and they will — you have a clear trail to analyze. You can pinpoint the gap between intention and outcome without getting lost in the maze of bullshit.
We’ve all encountered the alternative. The colleague who paints pictures of impossible success. The asshole who sells fantasies instead of results. The partner who treats commitment like so much loose change.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as some nice-guys-finish-last exercise in being a goody-two-shoes. But it’s more fundamental than that. It’s about whether you’re adding signal or noise to the world.
Choose signal. Make your word absolute. Everything else is negotiable.
