Brutal Consistency

The only thing constant is change, they say.

I feel it’s important to at least try having some things constant, however. So constant in fact, it should get easy to forget about those same things. Unintuitivelly, the effort to do so might turn into something that offers a clearer mind. And, pragmatically speaking, even the personal calendar empties itself by accident.

I’m talking about brutal consistency.

Doing things actually consistently is not that easy as it turns out. Even the smallest pleasant things are crazy hard to keep up with every day. For example, try having a cup of your favourite tea every evening. Piece of cake, you’d think - and it is.

On the second week you open your tea box and you see you’re out of tea. You look through the window and you see a disgusting hail happening outside while you’re cosied up here at home. Suddenly, the idea of skipping one day becomes rather attractive. The next day you forget to run by the store and remember only at the evening. The weather is not that much better and you’re tired because it was a long day. You skip a day again. Now think about doing something you don’t particularly like. Maybe even hate. And now do it every single day. That’s brutal.

There’s a silver lining to this, however.

Approaching things with consistency makes the said things more bearable. It becomes a thing you “just do” rather than something you need to get ready for. Motivation is taken out of the equation and the external circumstances also become irrelevant.

Taking the more pragmatic view about the matter, it’s a compounding factor. It enables us to approach grandiose ambitions in bite-sized pieces. On a personal note, it’s exactly how I managed to read over 100 books in a year. Sounds like it should take so much time, but it’s just a matter of reading around 100 pages every day. Half of that in the morning, and the other half in the evening. Done.

Difficult things are not as difficult if dealt with consistently. As you expect complex and/or complicated endevours to be tough, it’s going to stay that way no matter how you approach it. Unintuitively, achieving some personal grandiose goal is as hard as drinking that tea every single day.

It’s not uncommon to leave the most difficult things for the very end and then blame the circumstances or the “shortage of time” when delivery turns impossible. That’s just worry to be cured with a daily dose of “doing something”.