I didn’t appreciate the value of consistency throughout my childhood. I waltzed my way through most months at school doing the bare minimum. Then I’d go on a crazy sprint when it came time for examinations – pulling multiple all-nighters – to get the job done.
I began experiencing the limitations of this approach in the final 2 years of high school. So, after a rough junior year/11th grade, I decided to salvage my final year with more consistent effort.
Then I fell right back to old habits in my undergraduate years – only to definitively understand that inconsistent efforts result in poor results in the things that matter in this life. And that’s not just grades* – but domains like fitness, relationships, and learning.
This blog was created with 2 goals – to teach myself (a) how to better deal with failure and disappointment and (b) consistency.
And while this practice has delivered on the 2 goals above and many more I didn’t think of at the time, I think consistency has been the habit that has had the biggest impact on the quality of my life. No matter the problem – whether it is as important as figuring out how to improve my fitness or a challenging work issue, or something more mundane such as sorting out our family photos or diagnose a higher-than-usual water bill – I know now that it will be best solved with consistency.
This means breaking the problem down into a set of actions/or a system of actions. Then taking steps toward solving the problem consistently – daily or weekly or even monthly depending on the activity.
Nothing beats small things done on a consistent basis because it often has a compound impact on our outcomes.
*I did eventually trying a consistency focused approach to my academics in graduate school. No all-nighters were pulled and the results, to someone who hadn’t an ounce of consistency for all preceding years in schools, were astonishing. Good processes result in good outcomes in the long run.
