Why Consistency Works

Something that is undeniable about self-improvement, and featured everywhere, is the importance of consistency.

I am a massive proponent of consistency and know in my soul that it’s the greatest unlock for success and positive progress.

But the question that I haven’t heard a great answer for is… Why?

Yes, what Darren Hardy has popularized as “the compound effect” is real. And yes, what David Metlzer says about “zeroing out” when you miss a day on your streak is true.

But why specifically do results compound and successes escalate when you’re consistent?

The best answer I have for that is - Consistency creates leverage.

As Alex Hormozi describes it, the amount of leverage you have determines the amount of output you have for a given input. More leverage means more output.

The way that I see it, when we’re consistent we create leverage by becoming more efficient and effective.

It’s by being more efficient and effective that we can literally produce higher-quality outputs from the same raw materials of input.

The core mechanism of consistency is it gives you more repetitions. WIth more repetitions you get two very important things: More feedback and more attempts.

First about feedback - More feedback gives you more clarity on what works and what doesn’t. Per the 80/20 rule, feedback illuminates the 20% of the things that generate 80% of the results. Doing more of the right things means there’s less wasted effort, and less wasted effort is more efficient. This creates leverage.

Now about having more attempts - For you to get better at anything, you need to just do it more times. Theorizing and planning doesn’t actually give you the hands-on experience you need to tangibly improve. A rule of the universe is we naturally get better at things the more we do them, especially when under the guidance of ‘deliberate practice’.

This causes us to increase our level of skill. And when we have improved skill, we can do things more effectively (and therefore with more leverage).  

The last part about this that needs an explanation - Why are consistent repetitions more valuable than just repetitions?

Well the first and obvious reason is that more consistency leads to more repetitions, so it gives the process more opportunities to work. But more pointedly, consistency causes clarity and skill-development to stack.

When there’s time between repetitions, we don’t capture the enriched state of the previous improvement. The clarity becomes less cohesive, and the skill becomes less fluent.

Improvement and skill development follow a regression curve where over time the quality degenerates. If more time passes, your next repetition has more ground to make up and needs to ‘redo’ the previous advancement that was lost.

This is why consistency itself is another mechanism for creating leverage - It creates efficiencies and effectiveness within the process of development.

Now multiply these two factors of how repetitions work to create more clarity and skill, and how consistency promotes faster levels of progress... That’s how consistency is truly an exponentiator!

Knowing this information is one thing, but doing something with it is another. You must work to be consistent in your health and daily focus so that consistency can work its magic behind the scenes. If you want to see my secret sauce to being more disciplined and consistent in all areas of my life, this is for you!