I agree. Anybody who's 100 percent honest will sign on paper what he said in a handshake. He'll make the commitment real. A lot of people, especially friends, are about 95 percent honest; they'll try to do the right thing, but if they can't deliver easily, they'll try to weasel out of it: "I hope you'll understand: we're friends, right?" And that doesn't cut it for you when you're 100 percent extended on a deal. That's why the piece of paper, real and notarized.
It also helps you keep your friend. Maybe when he looks at it all down there in black and white, he realizes he might not be able to do everything he promised, or that it would cost more than he thought. And he can back out, after discussion, and you can both still be friends.
As for moments of truth: I was once in a bad spot in my life -- crappy job I hated, overweight, at odds with my friends -- and I asked myself what I was willing to do to get to a better place. How far I was willing to go to get what I want, how hard I was willing to try to get out of that place of pain. I kind of went into a meditative trance for an hour or so. Very weird experience. I was standing in the bow of a ferry crossing from a town I didn't know to another town I didn't know -- heading into the unknown -- and maybe that put me into the right mindset.
And I made some decisions then that guided me well for the next few years -- stayed with the crappy job long enough to become debt free and move on to other things, rearranged my life so I could lose weight, and so on.
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