Pete Davis > Quotes

“reality becomes whatever we commit to.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“Overcoming the fear of regret starts with lowering the stakes. It helps to remember that not every commitment is an existential saga, and that not all commitments have to be permanent. Commitments are relationships, and relationships are like living things. And living things die. When the life has gone out of a commitment, it’s no longer a relationship—it’s just a dead rule. It’s good to take on relationships and invest in them, and it’s good to work to heal relationships when they are sick. But when they are dead, they are dead. And there’s something morbid about playacting what’s not there anymore.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that we must choose between being an anvil or a hammer. We’ll either mold the world, or be molded by it. If you never go deep, you will always be the anvil. And the surest path to being the hammer is depth.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“Even if you get past all these monsters, there’s simply a lot of pain and exhaustion.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“Early in his career, Martin Luther King Jr. preached about the need to have three dimensions in our life: length, breadth, and height. Length is about our connection to ourselves. Breadth is about our connection to our community. And height is about our connection to the transcendent. If these three dimensions are out of whack, King said, we will be, too.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“And then one day they would kick it all down and it would crumble in an instant, because their inner experience of these activities had become hollow years before.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“Early in his career, Martin Luther King Jr. preached about the need to have three dimensions in our life: length, breadth, and height. Length is about our connection to ourselves. Breadth is about our connection to our community. And height is about our connection to the transcendent. If these three dimensions are out of whack, King said, we will be, too. This advice tracks the three fears of commitment—and the three gifts on the other side of them. When you defeat the fear of regret and find a vocation—a purpose—you find a connection to yourself. When you defeat the fear of association and find solidarity—when you make friends—you find a connection to a greater community. And when you defeat the fear of missing out—through the joy of depth—you find a connection to the transcendent.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“for we have in our power the ability to perform the slow but necessary work of turning visions into projects, values into practices, and strangers into neighbors. But only if we commit.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

“You exert your will to choose something bigger than yourself at the outset of a commitment, but because it is bigger than yourself, what it eventually asks of you is also bigger than your original choice.”
― Pete Davis, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing