How to Get Consistent (Hint: It's Not More Willpower)

“Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you've ever dabbled in personal finance advice, you've surely heard of compounding. It's a personal finance author's Michelin star. One of my favorite illustrations of compounding is from the book, wait for it… The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. In it, he poses this hypothetical:

Would you rather have $3 million in cold, hard cash today or a single penny that doubles in value every day in August?

If you appreciate the principle of compounding, you know the answer. 

If you chose the cash, you'd feel pretty good for most of the month. 

By day 10, I'd only have $5.12 as the penny-guy, while you'd be busy house shopping.

By day 20, I'd have a cool $5,243, and you'd be swimming in your brand-new pool.

By day 29, I would finally have caught up. I would now have $2.7 million in my bank account.

But by Day 31, I'm buying your new house out from under you with my $10,737,418.24.

That's the power of compounding – consistent actions that exponentially deliver results. 

It works the same in fitness. Someone who has been lifting weights consistently for a decade has more muscle mass and flexibility. This allows them to drive more force in their workouts, burn more calories, and have a higher resting metabolic rate, therefore burning even more cals at rest. 

Some evidence suggests that lifelong coffee drinkers have more cancer-fighting agents. Somebody who spends years cultivating a network will find getting a new job or switching careers much easier than the rest of us.

Small actions, repeated consistently over time, pack serious power. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear provides a cool illustration of this. Imagine you're flying from Los Angeles to NYC, and the pilot alters the nose of the plane just 3.5 degrees. The plane will still appear as if you're heading to LaGuardia but magnified across thousands of miles, you end up landing in DC. Be sure to check out the Holocaust Museum while you're there. It's heavy but worthwhile. 

Compounding also shows us that consistently doing the relatively simple things (that we all know to do) is the formula for success. You don't have to be a genius to be wealthy or an athlete to be healthy. You merely have to be consistent. The secret to success is longevity, survival, and staying in the game.

You may be thinking how obvious this is—rational even. And therein lies the problem. If our goal is to stay in the game long enough to reap the rewards, we don't need to be rational. We need to be reasonable.

Be Reasonable, Not Rational

In recent years, I've stopped recommending books to people. Too much depends on the timing of where somebody is mentally and emotionally in their life. My life-changing book is the solution to your sleep problems. But I do make one exception. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a must-read for all coaches and leaders to understand human behavior. It's in the context of money, but I've bitten off so many lessons and applied them to fitness and leadership development 

In the book, Housel writes about a particular investment strategy from Yale researchers. I don't understand the strategy, so I won't pretend I do. The point is that the strategy is mathematically solid. If you stick to the strategy, the researchers conclude that "the expected retirement wealth is 90% higher compared to lifecycle funds." So, follow their plan, and you'll nearly double your retirement account.

Simple as that.

The problem with the strategy is that in years when the market takes a huge downturn, you could potentially see your account drop to $0. A big ole goose egg. But the strategy calls for you to continue with the strategy anyway. 

The problem is that it ignores the very human experience of panicking and reactivity. Most of us (if not all) could watch our entire savings evaporate and continue forward with the very strategy that caused the disappearance.

And that's the problem. As Housel points out, their approach is rational but far from reasonable.

Being rational is being in line with reason or logic. Something we'd all love to be all of the time. But the rational person doesn't crush a tub of ice cream and binge-watch reality TV or occasionally show up to work off 3 hours of sleep. That would be the actual person – the emotional, complex, nuanced human being we all are.

To be reasonable is to accept human imperfection and make more realistic choices that increase one's chances of sticking with something for the long haul.

So, on paper, getting into a state of ketosis will aid in weight loss and energy gain and minimize diseases. But in reality, your kid's box of fruit roll-ups staring you in the eye, Bob's birthday at the office, or your Italian culture shoving plates of pasta under your nose eventually wears you down and keeps you from ever getting into ketosis.

Investing 20% of your income, sleeping 8 hours a night, and delegating your task load are all perfectly rational advice, but are they sustainable based on your individual habit triggers, current priorities, constraints, and current stage of life?

Stay in The Game

Robert Boice is a psychology professor who studied the writing habits of his fellow academics to see who was the most productive and successful. He found that the great writers made writing a part of their daily routine in a small way. These writers "wrote in brief daily sessions—sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours—and they religiously took weekends off."

These writers adopted a mindset and behaviors of consistency. They cultivated patience and a sense of "good enough," which allowed them to stay in the game for the long haul. They knew that no single session would deliver their War & Peace, but over the long run, their writing would compound. Over the long run, they would have a body of work to share and a certain quality that can only be generated through reps and sets.

Whereas other writers couldn't stand to have uncompleted work, which led to "stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor."

We see the same thing in dieting culture. People who fail have a sense of urgency ("I need results and need results now!') and a rigid, all-or-nothing mindset. They slash calories, increase their exercise, and commit to a total rehaul of their life. They add more items to their already packed to-do list, grow irritable because they haven't seen a carb in a week, and start seeing disruptions in their sleep. They inevitably quit. Leaving their metabolism and psyche disrupted in its wake. 

Recently, I've been working with managers who are taking the same all-or-nothing approach, which leads to burnout, sleepless nights, and increased work mistakes.

We all need to find the strategies that work for us to simply stay in the game. Every day won't be a home run, and some may be outright dogs, but the goal is to move the needle just a little bit.  

Here are some things to keep in mind:

Fun is a competitive advantage: a mentor of mine once told me this was her management philosophy, and she grew her Lululemon stores to some of the best in the country. 

There's a bro-science podcast I enjoy called Mind Pump. I was listening recently when somebody asked them, "Which is better for pre-workout: coffee or pre-workout formulas? The guys answered by saying whichever makes you enjoy your workout the most. Find ways to make the mundane fun or interesting. Make the intolerable more tolerable – out cheese in your broccoli. Work out with a friend. Make a game out of sorting inventory. Give your team the rest of the day off after completing a grueling task. 

Embrace constraints: our cultural ethos is that you can and should do it all. And if you're not, it's because you're not properly managing your time, or you need to buy my widget for three payments of $19.99. This makes us all feel like we're not doing enough. It's a hamster wheel you'll never step off of. We need to embrace the reality that we only get to pick a few things. Decide what you're unwilling to do and practice being okay with that.

Set your minimum viable productivity: on a recent episode of Take Care Radio, Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach Adrian Wellman talked about having different workout "tiers." He told me to create A, B, & C workouts based on how much time and energy I have in a given day. A-workouts are for when you have a ton of energy and time to get your ideal workout in. B-workouts are when you're slammed with meetings and projects but want to get a quick lift in. C-workouts are for those days when you just don't have the juice, which could be taking a short walk in the park.

However you approach it, the objective is the same: find ways to stay in the game. Live the fight another day. Focus on the penny, not the $3 million, and then five years go by, and you find success came a lot differently than you expected. You're happy with your health and wealth, and all these people who took the lump sum are asking you, "What's your secret?"