Consistency Is a Superpower
I am currently reading the book Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday. I am really enjoying it because it is on a topic I appreciate due to the success it has brought into my life: the power of self-control. Personally, I believe a key to unlocking the power of self-control is consistency.
In Discipline is Destiny, Holiday draws on the stories of historical figures we can emulate as pillars of self-discipline, including Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig had an incredible and long-lasting record of playing 2,130 consecutive baseball games. In his era, that statistic was amazing! Lou even got hit in the head (during the time in this sport when players didn’t wear helmets) by an 80 mile-an-hour fastball that knocked him out and sent him to the hospital. He somehow miraculously got up the next day and played baseball. Gehrig was a master disciplinarian. At the end of his career, x-rays of his hands revealed that he had sustained 17 fractures in his hands, which means he had played all those games at some point with 17 different fractures. It’s hard to play baseball with broken hands. Just considering the pain he must have endured is extraordinary.
I consider it a blessing that I was never the best in my life – never the smartest in school, and never the biggest, fastest, or most talented in the sports I played. But the one thing I did have was the motivation and the strength of mind to keep myself consistent. I have always been committed to making gains every day. Eventually those daily gains accumulated and culminated in my offer to play professional baseball and realize a dream.
I am a firm believer that consistency boils down to just making good decisions over and over again. So, how can you repeatedly make good decisions? Here are five personal practices that have helped me out:
Have a clear vision – for every part of your life – that is guided by the guardrails of strong values.
Bring a more positive mindset and positive energy than most others around you. We are talking about having an advantage – do something to a greater degree than most others and you will secure the advantage.
Grow every day. Foster a growth-mindset and take at least one step to actually grow yourself every single day.
Eliminate unnecessary distractions from your life – in all areas.
Leverage all available time for decision-making to ensure you respond, not react. Gut reactions – sometimes referred to as “Gave Up Thinking” – are not always your best course of action.
Of course, we could continue on and on about this topic. (Holiday even wrote an entire book about it!) But you’ve got to start somewhere on your commitment to pursuing consistency in your life. When you do these five things, you are going to be steady. In my mind, steadiness is just another way to model consistency. You or your company being better than most is just an accumulation of small gains every day. If you can outrun your competition just a little bit every day, that will create a wide margin over time. So, the question then becomes, how can you stay just a little more consistent than all of your competitors – just a little bit every day – so you can continue to inch forward more and more daily, until you ultimately achieve wild success??
As Holiday says, “Discipline is predictive. You cannot succeed without it.”
Written by Schuyler Williamson
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God Bless!
~ Schuyler Williamson