The Document That's Shaped My Life More Than Anything Else I've Built

I have a document I read to myself every morning.

It's called Lifelong Commitments: Unbreakable Contracts with Myself.

In it are 14 commitments that, regardless of the season of life I'm in, how much money I have, or how old I am, I plan to keep.

I'll give them all to you. But first, let me show you #2.

A simple, daily commitment to protect my mind.

In any given day, keeping this commitment doesn't change much about my life. Scroll Instagram for an hour, listen to NPR on the drive in, go down a YouTube rabbit hole before bed. No real harm done.

But one year, or ten years, of avoiding hustle culture propaganda on Instagram, fear-mongering on NPR, and brain-melting on YouTube?

That guy is a completely different person than the one with no restrictions on what he puts into his mind.

That's the power of these commitments.

In a given day, they're easy. And because they're easy, I can keep them consistently. If I can keep them consistently, they'll compound.

So today, I avoid yelling at my kids. In 15 years, that becomes a lifelong relationship.

This week, I do a date with Sarah (my wife). In 30 years, that's a marriage most people gave up on a decade ago.

Today, I read my Bible at 5am. In 20 years, that's a man who actually knows what he believes.

None of this is impressive on a single day. But all of it is radical on a long enough horizon.

The full list

Here are all 14 of mine.

Your list will look different than mine, but use it as a guide.

Where this fits in with "goals"

Notice that "Lifelong Commitments" are not "Goals."

Goals have shorter time horizons and are focused on a seasonal (12 month) accomplishment. They ask, "What do I want to do in this season?"

Lifelong Commitments have 10 year+ time horizons and ask, "Who do I want to become in this life?"

This doesn't mean set 10 year goals instead of 1 year goals. In fact, I think it's foolish to set 10 year goals, for a goal to be useful, it needs to be specific, and it's very hard to get specific about 10 years. There are just too many unknowns.

But you can be specific about the person you want to become. And in that sense, you can profit from the compounding effect of the "ten years" Bill Gates is talking about.

The fruit of keeping "keepable" lifelong commitments will surely show itself in future annual goals.

Years from now, when you set a lofty annual goal to take your 18-year-old backpacking through Europe for 3 months, you'll be thankful that you spent the last 10 years committed to building the kind of relationship where an 18-year-old would want to spend that much time with a parent.

How I built mine (and how you can build yours)

Here's the exercise I walked through to set my own Lifelong Commitments.

1. Begin with the end. Stephen Covey famously penned this idea, start with your funeral and think about how you want to be remembered. Who do you want to become? What do you value? Most people read that exercise, feel something, and move on. The 14 commitments are what happens when you don't move on. They're the funeral exercise turned into a daily practice.

2. Think in categories. Health. Wealth. Relationships. Faith. Mind. Whatever buckets matter to you. The categories aren't the commitments, they're the audit. They make sure you're not stacking 10 fitness commitments and zero on your marriage. My list has commitments across body, mind, marriage, kids, work, finances, and faith. When I look at it, every important part of my life is represented. If your list ignores a category that actually matters to you, that's a sign you're avoiding something, not that the category doesn't belong.

3. 7 to 15 commitments. Less than 7 and you're missing pieces of your life. More than 15 and you can't hold them in your head. I have 14. That number isn't sacred, but the principle is. Few enough to memorize. Enough to describe a whole life.

4. The 50-year filter. Look at every commitment you're considering and ask: "Will this still matter to me when I'm 70?" If the answer is no, it's a goal. Goals belong on a different document.

5. Where to store it. Mine lives in Notion, but the format isn't the point. Put it somewhere you'll actually open every day, not buried three folders deep, not in a journaling app you stopped using last year. Mine is pinned to my morning workflow. The first thing I do after Bible reading is open this list. If you can't get yourself to open it daily, the document is dead. Make it stupidly easy to find.

6. The worst-day test. A real commitment has to survive a sick day, a travel day, a bad week with a client. If it requires peak energy, peak motivation, peak willpower, it's a sprint goal in disguise.

"I work out on a cadence" survives a hard week. "I run six miles every morning at 5am" doesn't. Both could end up describing the same lifestyle. Only one is actually a commitment.

7. The one-page rule. 10 to 15 lines, max. One sentence each. If your list doesn't fit on a page, you can't recite it. If you can't recite it, you don't actually live it. The whole point is that these things live in your head, not in a Notion doc you open twice a year.

8. Read it daily. I try to read mine every morning. Not to remind myself what I should do. To remember who I am. Sometimes I forget and I go through seasons where I drift, but each time I go back to review the doc I'm surprised by how inspired by it I still am.

9. Tell one person. Share your list with someone, a close friend, business partner, your spouse. They want to help you become this person too.

What happens when you fail to keep your commitments?

These commitments are achievable, but they're still aspirational. The reality is, I'm not there yet.

I have days that I snap at my kids, overeat, and binge YouTube during work.

Then the next day, I wake up, read my list, and recommit. "Unbreakable contract" doesn't mean "perfect record." What's unbreakable is the fact that I'll forever recommit when I fail.

A 2010 study tracking habit formation over 12 weeks found that missing a single day didn't measurably affect long-term success. What killed people wasn't the missed day. It was the second missed day right after it.

That's ideal. But even if you go 6 weeks without reviewing these commitments (I have), you still have time to recommit. That's what's so powerful about these, there is no deadline.

Compounding doesn't require perfection. It requires showing up enough times over a long horizon that the trend is in the right direction.

One last thing

I have an annual review every December where I look at every part of my life, my marriage, my kids, my faith, my body, my work, and ask the same question.

Some years the answer is: drifted. And I recommit.

Most years the answer is: it shaped me. And I'm grateful I had a list to be shaped by.

That's the only thing this document is really for.

These 14 commitments are one layer of what I call my Vision Stack: lifelong commitments, 6 aspirational identities, long-term goals, 12 guiding principles, and this year's annual goals. Each layer feeds the others. I'll break down the rest in future editions.

What will be on your list?