Consistency isn’t enough
The prompt for today's post was swirling around my head at 3:30 am (thanks to my youngest daughter for waking me up).
Why do the gurus tell you that to be excellent, the main thing you need is consistency?
My hunch is that consistency is hard enough that most people won't do it (thus separating above average from average), simple enough to say that you don't really have to know much more about excellence, and easy enough to digest that it makes you seem like you must know what you're talking about.
But being easy to understand doesn’t make it right. In fact, for most people at the top of their game, one of the main feelings they have is being misunderstood. There’s a lesson in there.
Of course, consistency matters.
No, consistency is not enough.
The harsh truth is that there are plenty of people who do things consistently that never become great.
Nearly everyone I've worked with can think of a peer (teammate, coworker, or otherwise) that's showing up daily but never shows out. If consistency were enough, that wouldn't be the case. But here we are.
Consistency is what we'd call a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient for peak performance. It's a prerequisite and gets you in the game, but can't push you to the top. You have to stay consistent at your craft to have a shot, but you've got to add several other ingredients to even have a shot at peak performance, like:
• Minimizing mistakes
• Leveraging your strengths
• Resilience and adaptability
• Progressively higher, harder challenges in training
• The mindset and hardened skills to perform under pressure
• Optimized mindsets across areas of performance (talent, work ethic, stress, and rest, to name a few)
None of these things will come about by just being consistent. They come from testing yourself, experimenting, getting good coaching, taking risks, believing in yourself, failing, tracking progress, and quality practice, amongst other things.
Each of them requires real training of your mind and intentional work on who you are as a person and performer.
Consistency + intention + quality gets you much closer to excellence than consistency alone, but is much harder to do. Recognizing that excellence complex doesn’t have to be discouraging, though. It just means that if you truly want to be great, you have to do more than just show up.
If you want to get started going beyond consistency, here’s what I’d recommend:
• Pick a skill you want to develop
• Design a way to test it at your limits
• Ensure you have a system for capturing feedback
Then, get going.
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