How Consistency Is Misunderstood

Something that you’ve probably heard 100+ times before is that there’s no more powerful force for transformation than consistency. And it's true - People who have good habits are very consistent, and consistent action generates unimaginable positive results over time. So long as we stay consistent, we will continue to improve in the areas that are most important to us.

However, it's not the whole truth. Leveraging consistency requires an extra layer of detail. I believe that consistency is a bit misunderstood, and that’s because consistency actually has two different forms: 

1) Doing the exact same things many, many times

2) Taking a certain type of action that has nuanced variation each time

This is the difference between repetition and iteration.

Repetition is about doing the same thing the exact same way, every single time. Each repetition refines a skill or technique in a subtle way and creates fluency in the action. It’s the path to mastery so that you can reliably do a certain thing nearly perfectly. Like someone practicing free throws, or trying to nail their delivery in a speech, once you know what works you drill it into your behavioral patterning so that you learn to do it unconsciously.

But embedded in repetition is the smallest seed of iteration. Iteration is more of an experiment. You’re still taking consistent action, but the action itself changes as the process gets optimized. Iteration is required to attain mastery because it enables the tiniest adjustments that lead to 1% improvements in output. 

More often though, the action should change more significantly in order to generate progress toward a desired result. Most things in life are dynamic. As the world evolves around you, you must evolve your processes in order to maximize your pursuit of a certain dynamic result. This means that progress-generating consistency must be iterative and not repetitive. 

This is a bit of a disruptive idea because when people think about being consistent, they think it’s something that needs to be done the same way every day. That consistency is repetition. That if it’s not the exact same morning routine, workout, cadence of prospecting for your business, then it’s not consistent.

But the process of optimization requires that you take action, observe the result, understand what caused it through feedback, and try again in a way that’s better suited for the goal. It’s an iterative process that requires repetitions to fuel the cycle. In other words, it’s not repetition - doing the same thing the same way every time - that generates progress, but taking a newly refined action consistently.

This subtle nuance is the same reason why we call something a ‘discipline’ or a ‘practice’. The learning is never done. Environment changes, technique changes, tools and equipment change, what we want changes…

And if we keep doing things the same way we’ll always get the same thing. What we really want is improvement, and to achieve that, we cannot deny ourselves the opportunity to accelerate our growth because we’re pursuing consistency too rigidly.