Consistency Compounds

A few weeks ago I was listening to a talk John Maxwell gave at the EntreLeadership summit. In it, he talked about five things he does every single day: he reads, he thinks, he files, he asks questions, and he writes. He made sure to clarify that he doesn't do it all day, but he does it every day. When you look back at his life, his dedication to those five things, done daily for over 50 years, has undoubtedly been a major factor in his rise to become the most recognized leadership figure in the world.

The most powerful idea in that talk wasn't the reading, writing, and thinking. It was the distinction he made, that it's every day, not all day. As he put it himself, "consistency compounds." Speaking from my own personal struggles, I am a perfectionist. If I can't spend the full amount of time I need to in the gym, I just won't go. If I don't have the time to sit down and cold email everyone on my list, I just don't do it. I find myself falling into the trap that if I can't do it at a high level, I don't do it at all. The fact of the matter is intensity feels productive, but consistency is what actually produces great results.

What I have learned from analyzing the lives of people I admire is that consistency in good habits works like compound interest. Early deposits aren't impressive and don't produce big results. For a long stretch, the account looks almost exactly the same as it did the day you started, and that flat stretch is the part nobody warns you about. Maxwell didn't write his first book after a few good weeks of writing. It took years of small, unimpressive deposits before there was anything worth noticing. But the same small habits, done over a long enough period of time, eventually compound into exponential growth. The growth isn't steady. It's flat for a long time, and then it bends.

Here's the problem, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone, we want to see the extraordinary moment without doing the work that produced it. The world didn't see the thousands of shots Michael Jordan took before he made "The Last Shot" in Game 6 of the 1998 Finals. They only saw him make the shot he'll be remembered for forever. In reality, it was the consistent work of thousands and thousands of repeated shots that led to that one extraordinary moment.

Maxwell said something near the end of that talk that stuck with me more than anything else. In the beginning, you're not as bad as people think you are. And if you do it right, by the end, you're not as good as people think you are either. People only ever see one end of the account. They don't see the legal pads full of writing nobody read, the mornings at the gym nobody showed up to watch, the years of work that looked like nothing was happening. What they see is the compounded result, and they assume it came from talent instead of repetition. That's the real payoff of staying consistent. Not that you become better than everyone else, but that you stay in it long enough that people stop being able to tell the difference between skill and reps.

Find the one small habit you can actually do every day, not all day, and give it the years it needs before you judge whether it's working.