Consistency: The Magic Behind Achieving Anything You Want

When it comes to achieving our goals, we often focus on:

• creating a plan
• setting priorities
• and taking action

Yet, there's one vital ingredient that we often neglect:

Consistency

Consistency is the magical force that transforms our goals from dreams into reality.

BUT… it is rarely talked about.

Why?

Because you can’t sell consistency.

Consistency is hard and takes work.

But you can sell a specific outcome… and make people believe it will be easy.

Each of these ads is selling a specific outcome AND making people believe that the outcome is easy to get.

Most people think they need the “perfect plan” to achieve their goals.

And, unsurprisingly, most people never reach their goals.

In this article, we will discuss what high performers do differently and the one thing that makes them outliers.

And at the end of this post, I will share with you a Consistency Tracker and a Bonus Lesson from our flagship $5,000 High Performance Productivity Program: focus&action

(Don’t worry you don’t need to sign up for anything, it’s at the end of the article for free.)

For now, let’s discuss what it really means to be consistent and why people struggle with it.

That’s probably the best (and most famous) interpretation of consistency.

Anyone can do the excellent thing once.

Maybe twice.

But most people give up on the third try.

And that’s the secret to why most people are most people, not outliers.

Now does this refer only to success?

Of course not.

You can be a good father every day as well.

A good husband.

A good boss.

Employee.

Business partner.

Boyfriend.

Whatever.

It is how you become that, that sets you apart.

Take being a good husband as an example.

Imagine if you were a good husband to your wife for only one day of your relationship.

And for the rest of the days you were an average or subpar husband.

What kind of relationship would you have with your wife?

Probably not a very good one.

We can understand this concept in terms of relationships and fitness.

“Relationships take work!”

Everybody knows that.

Same with your fitness.

If you only hit the gym once… you’re never going to have the body you dream of.

(you already know where I’m going with this)

The way to have your dream body, dream relationship, dream life… is to “do the thing” every day.

That’s as profound as it needs to be.

And it’s the every day part that most people struggle with.

The natural question then becomes:

Why do people struggle with doing “the thing” every day?

The 3 Reasons Why We Struggle
With Being Consistent

1. We Don’t Understand Time

I think the first reason is because we don’t inherently understand the correlation between time and results.

There are a couple of ways of saying this:

• Temporal Discounting
• Instant Gratification

In either case, the short-term reward outweighs the long-term outcome — the one we really want.

There’s a reason why that saying exists.

Either we lose patience in pursuit of our long term goal, or we don’t see enough progress and results to justify continuing down the path.

Btw, this progress thing is important. We will touch on it later.

2. Always Looking for Shortcuts

The biggest reason that I think why most people struggle with staying consistent is:

They haven’t achieved anything significant before.

Because of this, they don't understand the relationship between time, effort, and results.

And the achievement doesn't have to be monetary.

It could be literally anything.

Losing 50lbs.

Getting your dream girlfriend or boyfriend.

Getting your business off the ground.

Turning your social life around (going from loner → social butterfly).

Basically, anything of significance that took some time and effort to produce.

Deep down inside, we all know that the outcomes we really want will take a lot of time and effort.

Anyone who has produced a significant result understands that it takes time and effort to create something meaningful.

And when we haven't had this experience, that's when we believe in shortcuts.

We want to believe that there is a “shortcut” out there that will get us our outcome without the time or effort required.

There’s a reason why that saying exists as well.

Unfortunately, most people will go from shortcut to shortcut and never get the results they want.

The irony is that if they put all that effort into doing one thing well, they would’ve been much further ahead by now.

Instead of forever remaining at the start line wondering why they never move forward.

Anyone who’s achieved anything knows this.

There are no shortcuts.

There are no secrets.

There is just the work.

3. Fear of Failure

This is the reason why most people look for shortcuts in the first place.

The moment you decide to go from ideas to action, the possibility of failure is introduced.

We all know that failure is part of the process…

…yet none of us wants to actually fail.

There’s a reason why that saying exists as well.

I think this is a primal fear we all have.

For millions of years, existence for humans meant: don’t die.

Or in other words: Survive.

A failure to achieve either of those meant imminent death.

Therefore, the interpretation of failure = imminent death is hardwired into us as humans.

That's why we avoid failure vs. chase success.

This is also called the Negativity Bias.

All it is is our fear of failure driving our actions on a primal level.

Kind of like arousal.

When you see an attractive woman or man (depending on what you're into), you find them attractive.

It is not a choice.

It’s something that happens beyond our control.

It’s primal.

Left untouched, our fear of failure is like that.

To a large degree, it's not a choice.

The good thing is that we have the ability to control (or at least overcome) our fear of failure.

But our default programming is still to avoid “the thing” that could cause us to fail.

Because that used to mean imminent death.

It does not, anymore.

This is one of those old programmings that doesn’t serve us as much in the modern world.

(Note: Yes, you can make arguments for why fear of failure is a good thing and why it’s still useful to fear failure. But that is beyond the scope of this article.)

Strictly speaking from a goal accomplishment and consistency perspective, the fear of failure is a hindrance, not an advantage.

To stay consistent, and pursue our goals, we have to figure out how to override this fear of failure.

How to Stay Consistent
& Override Fear of Failure

There are 3 things that will help you become consistent.

If you’re able to implement these, you will be miles ahead of most people.

Mostly because most people aren’t trying at all.

At least, they’re not trying the “right” things.

Let’s dive in.

1. Accept that on Some Days,
You Will Fail

This is the first thing to accept.

And is part of the conscious overriding or our default programming.

You are not perfect.

Nobody is.

You will make mistakes.

You will fail in pursuit of your goals.

But you will get to the end result you want (or close to it), IF you keep going.

The only way to fail in the long-run is to not even try.

(or look for shortcuts)

These “failures” can be baked into the process as well, and used as a motivation tool to keep going.

(I will show you how in the next section.)

2. Focus on Progress

Let’s say you want to get a 6-pack and you’re 50lbs overweight.

No matter what you do, you are not getting that 6-pack today.

Not in 3 months.

Probably not even 6 months!

Maybe 9 months to a year is a realistic timeline.

So what do you do?

How do you stay motivated to keep working out and eating right when every morning you wake up, look at yourself in the mirror, and see that you don’t have a 6-pack.

Aka… you are reminded every day that you have not achieved your goal.

What do you do?

You focus on Progress.

Think of it like going on a long drive.

The 5 hour drive is going to take 5 hours.

If every hour you look outside and wonder why you’re still not at your destination, you’re going to be pretty disappointed throughout the entire journey.

But if every hour, you look outside and think to yourself, “I am 1 hour closer to my destination!”…

…you’re going to feel more motivated as time goes on and have a pleasant experience during the journey itself.

It’s the same thing with the fitness example.

Are you headed in the right direction?

Have you lost weight in the last 30 days?

Have you gained strength in the last 30 days?

What have you done that warrants a mini celebration?

What are your wins?

That’s what your progress is all about.

What are the wins you’ve gathered along the way?

The more you focus on the wins along the way (progress), the happier you will be while you’re on your journey.

And you’ll be more motivated to keep showing up every day to do it over and over again.

3. Treat Everything Like a Challenge

This is by far the easiest hack to staying consistent with anything you want to do.

Doesn’t even have to be goals.

Can be behaviour change as well.

It’s so simple, it’s mind-blowing.

Track “the thing” for 30 days and see how many of those 30 days you end up doing it.

Then give yourself a grade at the end of the 30 days.

What you are doing is reviewing your performance.

If you don’t like your performance, go again and see if you can improve it.

Using this trick alone, I have:

• quit drinking
• qui smoking
• quit porn
• cemented my morning routine habits (6 of them)
• quit using filler words like “umm” or “like”
• developed a 5x a week workout habit
• read 1-2 books a month
• and so much more

This is such an easy and simple way to create behaviour change, it’s unbelievable.

And yes, consistency is baked into it.

So that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today.

How to Be Consistent
With Anything You Want

Step 1: Use this 30 Day Challenge Tracker: click here to get the template.

Step 2: Watch this bonus lesson video for how to use the tracker.

Note: This video is a bonus lesson from our focus&action 2023 live program.

Click here to join the waitlist to know when we open up our live program again.

If you can’t wait or need the focus&action system now, click here to learn more about focus&action content-only course.

In Conclusion

I know I said I was going to teach you how to do quarterly goal-setting this week…

…but then it occurred to me that if you can’t stick to doing one thing for 30 days, there’s no way you’re going to be able to stick to something for 90.

That’s why it was important to address this topic first.

But next week, I will show you how to do goal-setting for 90 days at a time.

And, more importantly, how to actually break down your goals into Milestones and Processes so you know whether you’re headed in the right direction or not.

This process has been a game-changer for our 1-1 business coaching clients.

If our clients can transform their lives in 3 months (or less), so can you.

See you next week.

Cheers.

-Abhi