Consistency Is Key, However…

Consistency Is Key, However… Simply Being Consistent Is Not Enough. What I mean is that just showing up every day and “doing work” only gets you so far. The quality of the work itself, as well as its substance — the work that you are actually doing — are more important than just being there, doing the work, and going home.

Not equally as important. I said more important.

Consistency Is Key, However It Has Its Limitations

Consistency is certainly one of the keys. But it is not the only key, nor the most important. It is true that being consistent in our efforts by itself overcomes so many obstacles, and lays the foundation for long-term success. It is also true that being seriously inconsistent will almost certainly result in little-to-no progress.

Consistency alone has a great deal of power to offset and mitigate many factors that are hindrances to our success. However, in my experience, it doesn’t matter how consistent you are if there are major flaws in the work that you are doing itself. In your methodology and your system.

While the emphasis on consistency is important, especially for people who are in the beginning stages of developing discipline, cultivating mastery, trying to learn new habits and skills. Many of us never had those issues, or tackled them a long time ago, and so the myth that being consistent is all that it takes to succeed — that consistency alone solves all problems — is not only potentially detrimental, but just plain wrong.

The limitations of consistency are the same as those that you find in the Power of Reading (and Its Limitations). Everybody is talking today about how important it is to read for an hour a day, how that learning can change your life long-term etc, etc. This is true. Yes, learning will change your life. But again, it is not reading that will change your life. It is developing serious skills and knowledge that can help you create programs,. products, inventions, businesses that will change your life.

The point is that reading and developing serious skills are different processes. In fact, reading is one small component of a sophisticated Learning Process that helps you develop serious skills. (As an aside, the problem for many scientists and scholars isn’t to read more, but usually to carve out time where we don’t have to read, because we have read quite enough and need time away from words on pages and screens.)

It becomes quickly apparent that reading has limitations. You cannot learn advanced knowledge and skills by reading about it. You don’t learn physics, computer science, mathematics, engineering, by reading. That is not how it works. You need a significantly more intensive process to develop real knowledge, and real skills.

Reading is passive. You also need extensive practice of skills. Problem sets and projects are more important for learning than reading. Memorization is also important, as well as Deconstruction. Reading is great to emphasize for people whose normal form of entertainment is Netflix, YouTube or Social Media. However, to get to the next stage, you need a more advanced skillset, toolbox, and approach. After reading 500+ books, that is when I realized that I needed to develop real knowledge and skills…

This is exactly true with consistency as well.

Consistency In A Perfected, Optimized System

The true power of consistency emerges when we are consistently doing all the right things — the essentials, the supplementals, maximizing our strengths while developing our weakness, and doing all of this cerebrally. This is the difference between being consistent reading books randomly on Computer Science, versus consistently training under the best Computer Science teachers at the best university.

Not that you need the best teachers at the best university, but that your learning process over 4 years is going to be intense, with the best materials, tools, environment guided by some of the best in the world who know what you need (because they have already done it). Therefore they can direct you to your goal, or to the person who is where you want to be.

The consistency can be exactly the same in both cases, but the results will be completely different. It is the difference between training with the best trainers in the world for your sport (say the best soccer coaches, scorers, passers, offensive coordinators, strength-and-conditioning coaches) versus going out to a field to randomly work with little-to-no knowledge.

You can do it on your own, but you need accept your limitations. Which means that you have to do what you can to bridge the gap in knowledge and experience with the little things, and in so doing overcome your limitations. Acknowledge your limitations, so that you can transcend them. Recognize that being consistent in a well-developed, optimized, and perfected system is the real way.

Deep Engagement Over Consistent Effort

One of the major hurdles that I had to overcome through more than a decade of consistently maintaining an optimized daily work schedule of 12+ hours, was (is) always finding my way back to deep engagement in my work.

One of the occasional difficulties with consistency is boredom. We become bored with what we are doing, which often (in my experience) is due to the fact that our training is incomplete. I become disengaged when I am just repeating things, going through the motions, and not seeing the progress I want. Whereas I am deeply engaged when I am learning new things, and developing towards what I wanted to achieve in the first place.

Again this goes back to my first point of Developing and Optimizing Your System, rather than being consistent at doing things that weren’t going to get you there in the first place. At every stage you need to be learning, and looking for mistakes and flaws in what you are doing.

As an athlete, you want to be learning new skills in your sport always. Mastering what you have, but always developing too. New fitness exercises, workouts, and goals. And constantly dialling your diet in to perfection.

Use engagement as a touchstone. Every time you felt great about your training, it is usually because you overcame something. Had a breakthrough. You finally got that skill down you had been working towards for months. You achieved something that only professionals can do well, or, in some cases, you overcame yourself by doing the work that day when you didn’t feel it.

Engagement means you are learning. It means you are excited. It means you are growing, developing, and are on the right track. Sometimes consistency is not the issue. You are finding it hard to keep up, because that is your intuition telling you that what you are doing is not cutting it anymore, and you are in need of an update.

Listen.

Take The Next Step

Consistency is one of the keys. If you don’t have it, then build it starting now, because you will need it. However the next stages, and the bigger problems, are investigating the root causes of inconsistency. These often come down to intuition.

You are not engaged because you are not learning, growing, and developing. Not quickly enough, nor in the direction you want to go, so you need to fix that problem. Develop your system itself. Your training program. What you are training. How you are training it. What your training program is pointing towards.

Often it is those factors being misaligned — and also misaligned with who you are and what you actually want, which is an even more serious issue — which creates a problem with consistency.

Consistency is key, however it is not the only key, nor the most important.