Aiming for consistency
I recently read Paul Graham’s essay “How to do great work.” It was an incredible essay that instilled a lot of valuable advice. I highly recommend reading the whole piece, but I want to focus on one of the tidbits of advice he mentioned, which is about consistency. He writes:
“Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.
The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.”
This is intuitive advice for people who want to accomplish things. If we want to get strong, we need to workout consistently, if we want to lose weight, we need to eat healthy consistently and if we want to learn a language, we need to practice consistently. Any change you want to make or any goal you want to achieve, consistency is absolutely critical. If you do things without consistency, you’ll notice months and years go by without progressing or accomplishing your goals.
It’s better to put in a smaller amount of work consistently than a larger amount of work irregularly. For example, which do you think would have a better outcome for someone who wanted to get fit:
Person A) Someone who does 20 pushups, 3 days a week
Person B) Someone who does 100 pushups occasionally with no regularity.
I think person A, over time, will usually have better results than Person B because they are consistently putting in work.
So, why aren’t people consistent? I think it’s usually one of two reasons:
They don’t set a firm plan/goal to be consistent.
Even if they do set a goal, they have no accountability or motivation to stick with it.
Writing consistently
My writing has not been as consistent as I’d like. I’ve had some months where I’m great at churning out posts and others where I didn’t release anything. Since reading the Paul Graham essay, I want to aim for consistency, and I’ll try to overcome the two issues that I mentioned above. I’ve made a simple goal to publish a blog post once a week, every Sunday.
For any goal, it’s important to have a why. Why writing?
Writing helps me think through and clarify things.
Writing allows me to formulate and express my ideas.
Developing the skill of writing is very important to me.
Writing allows me to connect with other people.
To hold myself accountable, I’ve committed to paying a friend $20 if I miss a week. This is a small penalty, but it will have a big impact because it’ll make it so I have extra motivation to publish a piece.
It’s important to aim for consistency. What other things can I be consistent about?