how to stop failing at consistency

Summary

consistency is the most-promised, least-delivered virtue in personal development. everyone says they want it. almost nobody has it. and the failure mode is always the same: you went too big.

two ways to fix it, both stupidly simple:

1. go tiny. smaller than embarrassing. one push-up a day. one social post a week. one sentence of writing. the rep matters more than the size. small rep done forever beats big rep abandoned in week two.
2. build systems. consistency on willpower is fragile. consistency on systems is durable. calendar it, automate it, batch it, remove the friction. your brain is not the variable. the setup is.

the order matters. go tiny first to prove the action. then build the system around it so you can scale without losing the rep.

the trap is going big and trying to systemize at the same time. you have to prove the small version works before you scale anything. consistency is brick by brick. always has been.

Transcript

you either do what you say or you don’t

You’re either the person who does what they say they will do or you’re not. There is no in-between. If there was an in-between, it’d be the person who never says they’ll do anything because they don’t want to be accused of not following through, which is way worse because you say nothing, you do nothing. So if you want to be the person who can be consistent, who does what they say they will do, let’s talk about the two ways to maintain consistency.

It’s the way I have maintained consistency in fitness for well over two decades. How I’ve done it as an entrepreneur for over a decade and a half and how I do it as a husband, a father, and a friend. So let’s get into it. The first way how to maintain consistency is to go small. You need to go as small as humanly possible when you are trying to achieve a goal.

way #1: go tiny, how to start smaller than you think

I love the big goal. I love the stretch goal. I love shooting for the stars and setting a vision and trying to think of all that stuff. But the truth is you haven’t earned going big. You don’t know how to achieve a big goal. And if you didn’t know another secret, you achieve big goals by a bunch of tiny micro goals, little tiny things that have to be done.

So let’s go over three examples of how you could go small. The first one I’m going to talk about social media because I work with a lot of people who just claim they can’t be consistent in something as simple as posting on social media even though they know that they need to. So if you want to go small and posting in social media, what do you need to do? One time per week. That’s it. Is that the most effective? Doesn’t matter. You need to go small enough to where you’re actually getting it done. So you post once a week. Don’t make it a big production. A great way to fail is to spend 25 minutes deciding what the social media post is going to be. Then spend an hour and a half creating it. Then another 15 posting it. And then worse, after it’s posted, checking it 47 times to see what the performance was or see if anyone liked it. That is how you fail at social media. You just need to do something that you can stick to. Make it simple. Make it repeatable. Make it once per week. Is that how you become successful in doing the online game?

Absolutely not. But it’s what you can stick to right now. So go as small as possible. Then after you can prove to yourself, you know what? I can do this once per week. Great. Now let’s do it twice per week. The second thing, let’s bring it to a fitness example, because I talked to a lot of people and I’ve coached a lot of people in fitness over the years.

And there is this fictitious person people make up in their mind. You think that you’re capable of doing something that you’re not like working out six times per week or working out five times per week. Like there’s some sort of switch that you can flip. Only you know about it, but you just haven’t flipped it yet. That badass person there, they’re in there somewhere.

But where are they? Why have they not come out yet? Why aren’t you the person who’s actually consistent with your fitness five, six days per week? You’re not going to flip that switch. It’s not happening because you’re not that person. And I’m sorry if I have to bring that news to you, but you’re not that person. So go small in the reality of who you are.

Just like the social media example, if you’re not doing five or six times per week, and now it’s time for you to flip that switch to five or six times per week, and you’ve been doing zero times per week, not going to happen. You’ll fail. You might do it for six weeks. You might do it for six months, but something’s going to happen. You’re going to revert back to who you actually are or who you were, and you won’t maintain it. So you need to go small once per week, twice per week, go as small as possible. And then even in the consistency per week, if you want to do two hours per day, not going to happen, right? You’re not doing that now. You’re not doing 30 minutes now. So do 15 minute workouts. I’m going to do two 15 minute workouts this week.

examples in social media, fitness, and making money

Doesn’t matter if that’s what’s going to get you to your goals. It doesn’t matter if that’s what’s affected. Again, if you want to be consistent, you have to go small in the reality of who you are, not someone else, not something that you got motivated on social media that you saw. You need to go as small as you possibly can in the consistency level that you can handle, which might be once per week for 15 minutes, do it a bunch and then scale it from there.

Now, the final example of going small, making money. I know a lot of people who want to make money online. They want to be an entrepreneur or they want to make more money. Let’s go real small here. How about you focus on making a hundred dollars? A lot of people are like, I don’t know if I could turn this into a multimillion dollar empire, or I’m not sure if I can get this side hustle to replace my income. Yeah. I don’t know if you can do that either. Maybe it’s not possible for you because you’re not consistent at all. But if you want to make money, let’s just focus on making a hundred dollars. Now that is your only goal.

I am going to go make $100. Everything from this point forward is how do I make that $100? Every book you read, every action you take, everything is going to be about how do I make that hundred dollars? And what you’ll find is it’s not all that hard to make $100 in whatever capacity you want to make it. So you’ll make it. And now you can move forward. You can maintain the consistency is needed for whatever actions it took to make that money, right? You’re like, oh, okay. If I, if I send out this many emails or I make these many calls or I reach out to this many people that equated to making a hundred dollars. Now I just need to be consistent in those actions and do it again. And I can make another hundred. Then you’re making a thousand.

Then you’re making 10,000. Then you’re making a hundred thousand. You don’t need to worry about if you can replace your income, you don’t need to worry about all these other little things that you’re getting wrapped around the axle about when it doesn’t matter. Just go make a hundred dollars and do the first thing, be consistent in something small, find out what the effort and action is required to get to your goals. And then don’t hesitate and don’t stop. Do those things over and over. Okay. Now we get to the second way to be more consistent. And that is to turn everything into a system after you’ve done it and you know how to do it. You have to turn everything into a system. Like for instance, my first example is going to be content creation.

I’ve talked about this before, but there is no way I could maintain any sense of consistency and creating content if I did not have a system behind it. So right now I’m recording a, an episode, right? But when I’m done, I’m going to upload these files. It’s going to go out to my team and they’re going to take care of it. They’re going to edit the video. They’re going to strip it for a podcast. They’re going to make the short form. I had to build those systems. It took hours and hours for me to build those systems and to educate the team and to hire the right people.

But now it is a system. Okay. It is a system to where I just do the one action and then I can have other people take the rest. If I had to set up the camera every single time, if it wasn’t already set up or if I had to do all the editing and you might be saying, yeah, it must be nice to have the team doesn’t matter. You can create your own system and make it as small as possible.

way #2: build systems so your brain doesn’t interfere

Going back to way one, you don’t need to be doing what I’m doing. We don’t have the same goals. So if your content creation needs to be turned into a system, it can be something as simple as I leave my camera set up at all times. That way I can just hit record. I don’t have to go through all of these, you know, hoops. I don’t have to jump through all these hoops to be able to create content, turn it into a system. Okay. I do this every Tuesday. And then after I’m done X, Y, and Z happens, eventually you’ll be able to farm that out to a team. But what you can’t do is have all these barriers to entry, stopping you from being consistent. You need to turn it into a system. So you know how it works each and every single time. All right. Now the second example, I’m going back to fitness. If you want to turn fitness into example, I love personal examples. Like how do you turn personal stuff into a system? Remove your brain. Okay. Remove your brain. That’s the best way you can turn fitness into a system. And if you’re asking, okay, what do you mean by remove your brain? Two things, put it on the calendar. And then that’s a non-negotiable. That’s a system. It’s a system. It’s a time system for you.

If it’s at 5 a.m. every day, and you’re capable of actually waking up at 5 a.m. every day, see way one. If you’re not, pick a time that you can actually do that you’re capable of. Then it happens at that point in time, every single time, or it happens at 5 p.m., whatever works for you. But you’re going to remove your brain because it’s going to be on your calendar.

And you’re going to treat that like it’s a meeting with the most important person in the world, and you cannot skip it. You cannot schedule over it. There’s no negotiables here. You have to happen. So the first system is just a simple time system. The second is remove your brain by getting an app. There are a thousand different people you could follow online. Find somebody who’s congruent with your goals and use their app to do workouts, okay? It really is that simple.

Again, another barrier to entry would be if I don’t know what time I’m working out today, and then I have to go to a whiteboard and make up a workout, or if I want to start googling around and trying to find a workout, or ask ChatGPT for a workout. None of those things are what you want to do. You want to already know, okay, the system is, time system, at 3 p.m. every day I work out.

automate & scale only after you’ve proven it

It’s a non-negotiable. And what do I do when I step into the workout? Well, I have my water bottle, my workout clothes on, and I open my phone to this app. The workout is there. My brain is out of it. I just need to do what the app says, and that’s it. So you can use any app you want, but I highly recommend you remove your brain from the system process so you can actually start to make more progress. Now the final thing, I’m going to go back to making money.

why consistency is brick by brick

If you wanted to make that $100 and you made it, you nailed it. After you nail it, you can scale it. And when you scale something, it’s an automation. So going back to making that $100, say you found out, okay, to make $100, I had to get 50 people on my email newsletter, and I had to make two offers over the last month, and one person took it, and it was a $100 thing, whatever the case is. Now you’re starting to be able to reverse engineer what is needed, and you can actually automate it. So you’re like, okay, well, I need 50 subscribers. I need 100. I need 1,000 subscribers, email subscribers, to my email newsletter to reverse engineer how many emails and how much money I want to make. So now you can start to put systems around how to get that many people into your ecosystem on your email newsletter each and every single week, every day, how many emails need to be sent. Okay, boom, checklist item, automate those, or just make sure that you’re sending them, following the system, and you’re sending that number of emails.

And then you can automate all these things, but you have to nail it first. You have to do the thing manually first, and then you find out, okay, those are the numbers. That’s the effort. How do I scale this? How do I automate it? Now you turn it into a system. Now you’re headed the direction that you want. If you follow these two ways, if you can turn everything into a system, and you go incredibly small, you will be more consistent than you ever have been in your entire life. But what you can’t do is continue to pretend that you aren’t who you are. And I know that might be harsh for some people to hear, but if you’re not the person who’s been consistent in your fitness, you’re not the person, okay? And that is fine. You can build yourself into the person that you want to be, but if you’re not there yet, know that it’s going to have to be done brick by brick by brick. You don’t start with a skyscraper, right? You have to build the foundation. Then after that, you go up one piece at a time. And to do that, you’re going to have to try harder.