TJL #18: The power of precommitment
And why Ulysses ordered his men to bind him to the mast
Hi friends,
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #18. In this newsletter I share the best of what other people have figured out already.
In today’s distracted world, we must take drastic steps to stay focused. One technique that can help with this is called precommitment: voluntarily removing future choices in order for you to overcome your own impulsivity.
An example of precommitment is saving for your retirement. We precommit to our own financial security by putting money in retirement accounts with steep fees if we withdraw early. We precommit to saving that money for later, because we know we will need it later in life.
Ulysses and the Sirens
This tactic of precommitment is ancient. With perhaps the most iconic example of precommitment being that of Ulysses and the Sirens, a story told in the Odyssey.
In the story, Ulysses must sail his ship and crew past the land of the Sirens, who sing a bewitching song known to draw sailors to their shores. When sailors approach, they wreck their ships on the Sirens’ rocky coast and perish.
Knowing the danger ahead, Ulysses hatches a clever plan to avoid this fate. He orders his men to fill their ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the Sirens’ call. Everyone follows Ulysses’s orders, with the exception of Ulysses, who wants to hear the beautiful song for himself.
But Ulysses knows that he will be tempted to either steer his ship toward the rocks or jump into the sea to reach the Sirens. To safeguard himself and his men, he instructs his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship and instructs them not to set him free nor change course until the ship is in the clear, no matter what he says or does. The crew follows Ulysses’s commands, and as the ship passes the Sirens’ shores, he is driven temporarily insane by their song. In an angry rage, he calls for his men to let him go, but since they cannot hear the Sirens nor their captain, they navigate past the danger safely.
By ordering his men to tie him to the mast of the ship, Ulysses precommitted to not succumbing to Sirens’ call, successfully avoiding the distraction.
Recap
Be like Ulysses, use the power of precommitment to successfully navigate distractions and to do the things you want to do.
Funnily enough, I said I was going to write about commitment devices here, in TJL #9:
In one of my next posts I want to talk about the solution to this problem: self-binding or commitment devices. Think of Ulysses binding himself to his mast so he wouldn’t give in to the Sirens’ call.
And well, … here’s to me, making good on that promise. Perhaps writing that down was a commitment device to myself?
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As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.
Previous TJLs
TJL #6: How to remember the difference between margin and padding
TJL #7: According to Jeff Bezos there are two types of failure
Sources
Zeb Kurth-Nelson and A. David Redish, “Don’t Let Me Do That!—Models of Precommitment,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 6, no. 138 (2012), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2012.00138.