Consistency: the name of the game (of life)
BoJack Horseman — “everyday, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it everyday. That’s the hard part”
Understanding ‘Consistency’
To understand consistency, we must remind ourselves of its original meaning.
“The act of doing something repeatedly over a period of time.”
The way I see it is that there are two types of consistency. The one that is the act of doing something repeatedly in return for something rewarding in the long term, or the one that is the act of doing something repeatedly for an instantaneous reward.
Example #1:
We tend to enjoy a cup of coffee every morning. We love the feeling it brings us so much that it becomes unintentional. We don’t have to go through the trouble of hard work to make that cup of coffee. We don’t even question why we do it, we just do. In this form of consistency, we are instantaneously gratified, hence why we do it everyday so easily. There’s no voices in our minds fighting the thought or even questioning it. We feel that we need that cup of coffee. We want it so bad, that we just end up doing it every morning. Is that considered to be a form of consistency? According to the definition, I think it is.
Example #2:
The other form of consistency is the one that consists of hard work in hopes of achieving something in the long term, rather than instantaneously — like that sense of gratification in the act of making a cup of coffee. The quickest example which I can come up with is training everyday at a certain sport with the goal of improving. Like running daily to get a better time at a certain distance, or practicing football everyday in hopes of achieving a championship title and improving at it as well. The efforts that go into the act of training every day is different than the efforts that go into making that cup of coffee. Yet, both are considered to be forms of consistency as long as they’re being done repeatedly and continuously.
Over the years, I’ve tried to figure out what the secret to maintaining consistency is. The difficult form of consistency. I’ve come up with a couple of factors to maintaining consistency; and I’ve come to realize that it’s all about the mental approach we have towards the things that we do.
Why does our mental approach matter most?
It’s the result of the energy within us that we feel towards certain tasks. In school, I always tend to ‘hit the wall’ and stop being as attentive or persistent with my academic work halfway through the year. And that has happened every single year for the past 12 years of being in school. The reason behind it is quiet simple. I don’t enjoy the process of studying. My mental approach towards studying is “I do this because I have to, and not because I want to”. My energy that comes from within essentially becomes somewhat negative and undesirable. So, I’m bound to hit the wall, and break my consistent efforts into trying to keep up with the studies.
For me, waking up to school at 6am is a lot harder than waking up to go on a run at 6am. Even though both are done at the same time, one is more desirable than the other; so of course, I’m going to feel more excited to do the thing that I love. For that, my consistency with running is going to be a lot easier than my consistency with going to school and doing schoolwork.
It’s quiet a simple idea. We hold on to the thing we love for a longer period of time than the things that we don’t enjoy.
The measure of how badly we want things in relation to our consistency
In my mind, I have come up with an imaginary scale of how badly we want the things that we work for, and their result being whether we accomplish them or not. When we have a goal in mind, no matter how bog or small, we only achieve that goal when we want it bad enough.
Having this mentality makes it easier to understand why we stop doing certain things, and that’s usually because we don’t want to reach that goal badly enough. This essentially becomes a testament of how much we truly love the things we think we love, like our job, or our projects, or whatever they may be. The work we put into it is the result of how badly we want it. It’s that simple. It can also be used as a motive. We can tell ourselves, that no matter what happens, we’re going to do what it takes to reach that goal, just to prove to ourselves that we want it badly enough.
The stages to consistency:
- The choices we make
- The things we are willing to sacrifice
- Goals and intentions
- Building habits
- Taking fixed breaks
