When there's no retreat, the path forward becomes clear.

In the thick of the Chu-Han contention, in the tenth month of 204 BCE, the Han general Han Xin (d. 196 BCE) was attacking the state of Zhao north of the Yellow River. The narrow mountain road of Jingxing was so treacherous that two carts could not pass abreast, and Zhao had stationed an army of two hundred thousand at the pass. Han Xin's forces numbered only some tens of thousands. By ordinary strategy, retreat was the answer. Han Xin moved the opposite way. By night he selected two thousand cavalry and hid them behind the Zhao camp, while at dawn he led his main force out and arrayed it with the river (the Mianman) at its back. His officers were aghast. The Art of War teaches: "Do not array your troops with water at their backs." With a river behind, there is no flight, and soldiers collapse in terror. Han Xin answered with a smile: "The Art of War says: cast them into a death-ground and they will live; place them on a perishing-ground and they will survive (陷之死地而後生, 置之亡地而後存). Today I will place my soldiers on a death-ground. With no road to live, they will not fear to die." When the battle began, Han Xin's soldiers fought desperately with the river at their backs, for there was nowhere to flee. Meanwhile the two thousand hidden cavalry entered the Zhao camp and planted red banners. The moment the Zhao soldiers looked back and mistakenly thought, "It has already fallen," Han Xin's main force charged from the front. The army of two hundred thousand collapsed, and Han Xin became the legend of Jingxing.

The English commitment is the noun form of the verb commit, and the root of the verb is the Latin committere. The verb is made of two parts: com- ("together, completely") + mittere ("to send, to place"). Literally, "to send together, to entrust completely." In Roman times the verb held various meanings: "to set against each other (to join battle)," "to entrust," "to commit (a crime)." What they had in common was "to perform an irrevocable act." To "commit" a gladiator to the arena meant that once the gates closed it was over, and to "commit" a soldier to the field meant the same. When "commit" entered English in the fifteenth century, its most common meaning was "to entrust, to consign." The religious phrasing "I commit my soul to God" is typical. The noun "commitment" first appeared in the 1610s. Its early meaning was "the act of consigning someone to prison." That is, commitment from the very start meant "moving into an irrevocable state." After the nineteenth century the meaning broadened to add "promise, obligation," and in twentieth-century psychology and management the modern sense — "devoting oneself wholly to a particular goal" — became fixed. Erich Fromm's 1956 book The Art of Loving defined love as "a commitment" — the resolve to erase the place one might return to.