Endure the tediousness of repetition and focus on the process to overcome mediocrity. Focus less on working hard and more on working consistently.
You don’t need to be exceptional. You just need to be consistent.
How consistency is the key to exponential results.
Consistency and the Compound Effect
Let me start by saying this: consistency is boring. It’s dull, frustrating even, to do the same thing day in and day out. It will suck. However, consistently performing small actions accumulates incredible results over time. This is known as the compound effect.
However, what if we knew the power behind the compound effect? What if we knew that putting in a little effort every day builds momentum until suddenly, you’re putting the same effort in yet achieving 2x or 3x the results.
We have to understand this and show up day in and day out. What is the alternative to the instant magic formula for success? Consistency.
Whilst creating a new website during 2020, I would ask myself, why am I not getting anywhere with my blog? Why are people not flocking to my website? Well, firstly my writing was not that good and secondly, it largely comes down to my response to:
Do you write every day?
No.
Do you produce content on a regular basis?
No.
Well then.
Life is full of distractions, social media, the endless consumption of entertainment. It is difficult to see through the fog and realise what is truly important. As a result, most of us find it difficult to remain consistent. However, I propose that consistency is vital to creating exponential and remarkable results over time but also changing your life with significantly less effort than the typical approach: brute force and intensity.
Consistently performing, creating, improving just 1% a day, means you will be 37 times better off after a year.
There will always be more talented people out there, smarter, better looking, louder, etc. However, consistency beats natural talent. It beats luck. It beats intense hard work. Consistency is the unglamorous but sure path to success. If we can endure the tediousness of repetition and focus on the process then we can achieve incredible results over time.
The power of small actions every day
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, talks about a friend who wrote three books in 9 months. How did he do it? He wrote 1,000 words a day for 253 days straight.
The lesson?
It’s about doing unsexy things consistently, doing work that pays off in the long run.
We can all write 1,000 words one day but could we do it for a week or 9 months? Consistency beats intensity, talent, and luck in the long run. If you show up every day, you become stronger, more focused, more skilled. What seems like small, marginal gains and improvements at first explode into exponential gains as they accumulate.
This is not theoretical.
Buffet’s daily actions did not have a significant impact for the first decade of his career (age 14–24) but compounded until, at the age of 53, his net worth was almost doubling every three years. Buffet earned 99% of his wealth after the age of 50. Such is the power of consistency.
Nor is this limited to finance.
The British Cycling team went from one hundred years of mediocrity and being denied bikes from top European bike manufacturers (because of embarrassment over British cyclists using their bikes and impacting their sales) to winning 178 world championships, 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and 5 Tour de France victories between 2007 and 2017. In the 110 years prior, no British cyclist had previously won the event. What changed?
Coach Dave Brailsford improved every tiny detail by 1%. It is about the aggregation of marginal gains: searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything that you do. This comes from consistently improving every day. The best massage gels were chosen. They redesigned the bike tyres and rubbed alcohol on tyres for better grip. The marginal gains add up. If you add up all the 1% improvements in all areas of your life, you will get incredible results.
This can be applied in every area of your life.
Examples
What if you did one kind thing for yourself every day? What if you said one nice thing to your friend a day? What kind of relationships could you have? What kind of friendships could you have? Life is suddenly full of possibility and meaning when you focus on the marginal gains.
Do you want to become more organised?
Broadly write down your goals and plans for the next day in a daily planner.
Wake up at the same time each day.
Do you want to become a good writer?
Write a sentence each morning.
Read a page of a book from an author you love.
Do you want to become strong?
Do 10 pushups on three of the days this week.
Do you want to be taken seriously at work?
Show up 15-minutes earlier to meetings. Always be on time.
Notice that the action does not have to be difficult, glamorous, or large. In fact, you should focus on the minute and small when just starting out. You cannot improve a habit if you have not established it yet. Therefore, start small, perhaps 1% of your goal, and scale up each day as your ability improves. As you show up, not only do you gain confidence in that you are living a disciplined life: you are actually doing what you set out to do, but your experience grows exponentially. You are on the path to exponential results. You become the type of person who writes, who is strong, who sings, with each small win. You prove your new identity to yourself as the evidence accumulates.
If a penny doubles in value every day for 31 days, by the final day it will be worth $10,737,418.24.
5 key points to apply in your life:
- Worry about your average speed, not your maximum speed. This helps avoid burning out and keeps percentage improvements constant. You may be able to write 10,000 words a day but can you keep that up for two days, let alone a year? Probably not. That is why it is better to write consistently and scale up slowly as your ability to do so increases. You may run 20km one day a week (maximum speed) but your average speed per day for that week would be around 20/7 = 2.9km. However, if instead, you ran 5km a day, your maximum speed would be much lower but your average ‘speed’ per day would be 5km and you’d run 35km, 75% longer. Consistency beats intensity.
- Little things bite. Making 1% worse decisions is detrimental in the long run. In the moment it does not change your life. It feels insignificant. So does it really matter? Yes. A significant gap forms between those who make decisions that are minutely better than those who do not. If you miss one class, it matters little but if you miss one class a week for an academic year your understanding of the subject would be poor. The same is true in life. Forget it once, that’s okay. Life will get in the way sometimes. Things out of our control inevitably happen. But stay off track for too long and not only will you lose momentum but you will regress. So remember, the little things do matter.
- You will suck at first. There will be a large gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Do not let that dishearten you. In focusing on marginal gains and improving yourself every day, you begin to forge your path and take control of your life. Don’t sleepwalk through your choices. Take control of your life. We live in hustle culture, fast food, next day delivery times. It is natural that we want to be so good so fast. However, we may need to embrace the fact that we are not yet ready for instant, monumental change. Instead, we need to work consistently and build up our ability.
- Fight the boredom. The daily disciplines that are required to reach high performance in your field may be mundane, dull and unexciting. Regardless of our passion, there will almost always be activities that are vital but dull. Yes, there are the moments of motivation and passion but you have got to get through the difficulty, the mundane tasks. Overcome the tediousness, especially on the bad days. That is when it truly counts.
- Inconsistency interrupts the compounding process. Inconsistency means we lose our momentum time and time again. As Warren Buffet said, “the first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.” If you don’t break the streak, you achieve results faster than you’d expect.
With these in mind, we are well equipped to understanding consistency and applying the compound effect towards achieving our goals.
Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion stay in motion. Rockets use more fuel during the first few minutes of flight than the rest of the trip. The hard part is getting off the ground.
Conclusion
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This is why habits are crucial. They cast repeated votes for being a certain type of person — James Clear
It’s less about working hard and more about working consistently. How often will we work ourselves to the brim and yet see the world indifferent to our efforts? By focusing on consistency, on marginal gains each day, we can achieve goals that are 5x bigger with 1/5th of the effort.
Is it not incredible how a mere 10 minutes a day can transform your life in the long run? Waking up 10 minutes early so you can run? Or perhaps running is too much. Walk to the end of your road. Imagine if you started your day by walking to the end of your road every day for a month? A year? Every choice you make is a vote for the type of person you want to become.
Choose wisely.
