How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

The useful part

False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. It is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust. Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves.

How it works

• How to Do Things with Words (public library) — the posthumously published adaptation of the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1955.
• […] To do or to say these things is to make plain how the action is to be taken or understood, what action it is.
• You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)
• Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be,...
• When our word does break even on the finest point of our best intentions — we are, after all, human and therefore perennially imperfect predictors of ourselves — we are left to apprentice ourselves in the...

What to take from it

Today, in a world that has normalized overpromising and underdelivering, a world in which people habitually make plans and promises and commitments only to cancel them, the discipline of keeping our word is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. Nothing, therefore, is more fundamental to self-trust — which is the basis of self-respect, which is the basis of respect for others — than learning to make keepable promises. Of all the performatives, a promise is the most binding, the most revelatory of personhood.

Example or evidence

• He writes: "I promise to…" obliges me — puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle.
• This commitment begins with the simple prerequisite that "the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention" — namely, to keep their word, which doesn't only represent something but does...
• For instance, the utterance "I do" (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony.
• Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something — namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying.

Details worth keeping

Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. Le Guin, whose praise for Austin led me to his wonderful book. The act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting, is at least preferably (though still not accurately) to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign.

Related coverage

• Ragan: Exploring the comms gaps in follow ups.
• Theartfulage: Two measured failure points, neither of them weak character: how we price a job at the moment of promising, and what actually holds a promise up once it is made.
• Scrum: Fourteen Wizard's Rules ago, this series made a claim: most agile failures aren't failures of process, they're failures of honesty.
• Omanobserver: A dancer wearing a traditional costume performs during a "Convite," a traditional dance festival in Guatemala— AFP