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Most lives are like that… never really getting from A to B…
I just read something really profound that can change your life.
Don’t think about being consistently great. It’s a trap. It’s impossible. Think about being great at being consistent. It’s a reliable path to growth and achieving one’s potential that makes a lot more sense.
Replace ‘great’ with whatever you are weak at…
One of my students invented herself being excellent… and it has proven to be harmful. It acted like a straitjacket she needed to escape from.
But because she really meant it only for her work, she needs to return to the straitjacket… and run away again.
She could have invented practicing excellence so she can get great at it…
Or she could have done what I have been doing… and it is the secret of my peace of mind. And virtual invulnerability.
I realized some 20 odd years ago that any ‘virtue’ is always on a scale. When something, even something as edgy as excellence is on a scale, then you can measure it.
On the scale of excellence this effort, this work, this past hour has been 26%.
Oh, OK. 26 is a number, and there is nothing wrong with it. A number is a number.
When you can bring this ‘things are all on a scale, measurable’ concept to life, then you just bought yourself peace of mind.
You can even compare numbers, and still numbers are numbers, and being a bigger number doesn’t mean good, and being a lower number doesn’t mean bad.
A student of mine consistently forgets, maybe willfully forgets drinking her coherent energized water. As a result her intelligence drops to 40. To do this work, to have the energy to grok the concepts, you need that number to be 100.
When I remind her that she needs to drink more water, she hates me, she hates herself. The opposite of peace of mind.
Before she can do the work and benefit from it, she needs to get better at drinking her water.
Her current number is 1%. It is a number, as good as any number… A good number can be grown. A bad number is an opinion.
As soon as she creates some structures to make sure she drinks her water consistently, a few ounces every hour, her ability to grok the work will be back to where it normally is, when she is hydrated.
Consistency is a big issue for everyone. Life is busy, and you need to remember to be consistent.
It needs to become a habit. Or it won’t happen
So I walk around with a kitchen timer hanging on a rope around my neck. It is set to ring every hour, so I don’t forget to drink my water.
We have so many tasty liquids to drink, that we never get thirsty, so counting on thirst is not going to work.
But believe it or not, consistency is king if you want to be deserving, if you want to become worth a damn.
Consistency instead of campaigns. Consistency instead of doing because you have to.
All habits need a trigger. Leaving the trigger to fate is simply stupid. You need to manufacture a trigger, like my kitchen timer.
And in my experience, without forcing, enforcing, making sure the trigger goes off, no new habits can be established.
But if your life is the sum total of your habits, your life will remain as it is… whatever that life measures on the health, wealth, love and fulfillment scale.
So what would you have to hate to finally become consistent in what matters?
Any suggestions? Please comment.
If there is something I hate more than anything is this sense that no matter what I do, it doesn’t get me what I want.
A sense of powerlessness. So I use that hate to actually get things done, be consistent if that is what it takes to get the result.
What is your power source?
If you don’t hate well enough, you have no energy, no motive power. None… or just not more than to get through the day.
What kind of life does it give you? Don’t you hate it?
I measure your motive power in the Starting Point Measurements. It is what gets you out of bed in the morning, it is what gets you do anything worth doing. Most people have so little, they crawl through life…
No hate, no energy.
No consistency, no results. Guaranteed.
