Less Effort, More Consistency

I am in Darren Hardy’s Jump-start program and man is he giving us the honest truth. When you think of personal development you usually think of discipline and hard work and grit, but in Jump-start Darren teaches us how to re-frame our focus and put our energy in the right places. The most important factor in taking positive action is consistency.

In fact, Darren calls humanity’s fatal flaw “inconsistency”, and the reason why so many people fail to be consistent is because we are all hardwired to seek immediate gratification and cannot rationalize the value of delayed gratification. This causes us to start and stop and start again, demanding so much effort every time we get moving because we have to break inertia, putting in an amount of work that isn’t congruent with the results we're getting out. 

However, there’s a secret to consistency that I think we all can appreciate. You don’t need to work as hard to sustain the same level of performance! Once you have things in motion, it requires much less energy to keep pace on the same trajectory.

The example Darren uses is a locomotive. That thing is heavy, and in order to get it going you need to generate a ton of force. Once it gets going, it just needs to be maintained and requires only a fraction of the fuel! Our results work the same way. As a byproduct of the actions we take to keep moving forward. The currency of these actions isn’t intensity, it’s consistency.