A recent conversation with a client illuminated what I imagine many people get wrong about consistency. 

They conflate perfectionism with consistency. 

I’ll explain:

Let’s pretend you’re trying to increase your thought leadership and commit to writing for one hour 3x a week. 

Things start off great, but by the third week, something happens at work that requires a ton of your attention, so you only write once that week.

You think:

“I’m not consistent, what’s the point, screw it.”

The point is you were still able to write once that week. You still showed up. 

Even if some weeks you only found 20 minutes to write, the point is that you wrote. You were consistent with writing about your ideas, you just didn’t do it “perfectly” 100% of the time. 

The problem with conflating perfectionism with consistency is that perfectionism isn’t achievable. 

What if the secret sauce behind long-term consistency is embracing the imperfection that makes showing up for something over and over again over time possible?

Imagine what you can create by being imperfectly consistent for one year, five years, etc rather than striving for perfection and giving up. 

Here’s to being a human and not a robot.