“Commitment is an internal drive in a person. It’s a gauge on your internal compass and ability to stay true to your North.”
Commitment is the state or quality of being dedicated to a particular cause or activity. This is according to Oxford Dictionary for which I have taken the liberty to choose the most ideal in this circumstance. In our own experiences and encounters with individuals in the journey of life I am confident we’ve had our commitment tested or at the least been urged to commit to something. On the same note, there are moments that we’ve been sidetracked and failed to commit to something we promised to commitment to thus leading to betrayal of an individual, a cause or failing to achieve the intended results. That’s the cost of not committing to something when we know quite well we should commit to it.
I happened to have been introduced to Bikozulu’s blogs this year by my sister. At the moment, I enjoyed reading his blogs because they were stories that we encounter in our daily lives. I could relate and by so doing I had at least a lesson to learn. If not I had a smile on my face and that was good enough. Today in the course of my daily schedule, the routine notification on Tuesdays came and there was a piece from Biko. Having had a strained morning trying to stay on top of things I decided to take a breather and his piece was the let out. Reading through the piece as he recounted his journey from losing a job in 2009 to the current 10 years of blogging, I couldn’t be more proud of his work commitment and dedication. From start he didn’t know that he would have such level of following, get to write two books within this timeframe or even be able to cater for his bills from blogging. In hindsight, this is now a possibility courtesy of his commitment and dedication. I felt challenged and at the same time encouraged to keep going. Not because I intend to get to achieve the same results as his but because I feel we need to nurture a culture of continuous learning, social responsibility and a growth mindset. That’s my drive behind blogging as I try to look into the experiences we have in our lives which have lessons for us but often missed.
I am convinced that with commitment we can do much but rather than looking at commitment as a way to satisfy an external demand or force; I believe it’s an internal drive to stay the cause. Often times we have people start projects, initiatives and quit along the way. By so doing, they let their dream wilt never to see the light of day. At the start of anything, we need to find a reason beyond the immediate need to do and use that as our landing whenever we feel the urge/push to let go. If we can get to this, we have a chance to keep going and hopefully realize our aspirations. At worst we’ll fail but having tried and gave our best at it. This reminds me of a reflection I had at the start of the year looking at the work we’ve been doing with Ryculture Health and Social Innovation which I am dedicated to like a first born. In retrospect, I realized that there had been a couple of youth-led initiatives that were founded during campus years but unfortunately they never survived a year or two post-graduation. In assessing the trend, I realized that the reasons behind these were lack of mentorship/guidance post graduation, adulting takes a toll on individuals and when people secure jobs, the start up is dropped like a hot potato. This is almost definite as most times these initiatives don’t have the financial resources to sustain the founder thus letting go is an easy option. With this we established the YouTH Voices programme which is aimed at offering young people a platform to share best practices from their work, offer them mentorship and guidance, expose them to networks and support platforms like incubators and inform policy from these to fuel an entire ecosystem. There’s nothing as fulfilling to know that these may be the solutions an individual is hoping for to nurture their idea. On this account, we’ll be having our inaugural YouTH Voices Summit on 3rd and 4th December 2020 virtually on Zoom.
I’m convinced that there isn’t anything easy about all that we do and contend with in life. This doesn’t give us a reason to quit but the grounding that there is need to put in extra work and push on to the end. With commitment and dedication to what we do, our chances of success are heightened, let’s not bow out early.
“Commitment is what transforms a promise, resolution, aspiration or vision to reality.”