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Precommitment

2026-02-11 · 793 words

If I gave you a pill that would change you and make playing the viola your goal, passion, and reason-for-being in life, would you take it? Viola players: substitute viola for tuba.

Obviously not! Playing the viola is nice and all, but the desire I proposed is not yours. Your desires aren’t fixed, but they are yours.

A while back, a mentor gave me this advice:

Isaac, you’re pretty good at math. Math is static. You solve a problem one day, and the solution will be the same the next day. People are different, people change. You think you understand what makes them tick one day, and the next day they surprise you. You have to pay attention.

People grow and change. I grow and change. The dream I had of being a pilot as a kid is still buried in there somewhere, but it’s not fully mine. It’s the dream of an earlier self.

We are playing a constant game of cooperation with our future selves. (“I’ll do this work now so you don’t have to stress about it tomorrow.”) Sometimes we drop the ball. (“I wish I did this yesterday! What was I thinking!?”)

Cooperation built on iterated self-interest is fragile. Procrastination is placing your current desires above those of your future self, in that sense.

How do you make cooperation robust to future temptation? The answer lies in precommitment, binding yourself now so future-you can’t defect. You have the capacity to do anything, but there are many things you choose not to do. Promising to never do something, or to always do something, is precommitment.

Consider Ulysses and the mast. From the epigraph at the beginning. He desired to hear the siren’s song, but he precommitted not to succumb to it. In binding himself he constrained his action space, and made it through.

This morning I had an erg piece. I wasn’t feeling the best this morning, but I wasn’t feeling bad enough not to do it.

Our cox Gav says, “once you start a piece, never get off.” It’s better to struggle through to the end than to even tempt building the habit of getting off halfway through.

Not getting off is a precommitment in the body. It is deciding before the piece starts that quitting is not in the action space. It’s removing the Exit. Creating a crucible where you can be refined.

Likewise, this habit of daily writing I’ve been working to establish is an extension of the same principle. I have wanted to write daily for a long time — and now I do. I’ve precommitted to never publish anything on this website under my name that I did not author myself, and I’ve remained true to that commitment. In the process, I’ve improved a lot as a writer, both in terms of the quality of my prose and my consistency. But I’ve missed days, and published pieces that could have been better, in retrospect.

Precommitment does not require perfection. Perfection is a process, motion towards a desired state, and not a state in and of itself. Precommitments can be temporary or eternal. You can precommit to not get off the next piece, or not get off any piece.

If you break a rule, the game stops, and you stop playing. Yesterday I included a story about a couple that feared they were going to break up, and fed that anxiety until it happened. The biggest issue here was that breakup was seen as final; they denied themselves the possibility of re-entering.

That’s the choice with precommitment. Do we re-enter or withdraw? Re-entering is harder, but precommitting to re-enter is the strongest type of promise there is. Precommitting to re-enter, even as the game evolves and the rules change, is the only way to cooperate beyond reason to preserve collective agency.