How to become automagically consistent

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, kids just in bed, garden doors open. The sun is going down. This is the moment when the birds give their evening singing show. They perform every morning and every night this season.

Consistency. Discipline.

Those are the buzzwords you get thrown at as well when you dig into anything that has even the slightest thing to do with social media.

Show up every day. Don’t rely on motivation. Discipline. Hustle.

And it’s not wrong.

I show up every day. I post every morning. I’ve made visuals on this. I think discipline is important.

But what’s wrong is the framing.

Most online hustle gurus talk about consistency and discipline as the primary goals. As if you just need to flip the switch and then you’re disciplined enough to be consistent.

That’s not how it works. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it, and we all know how difficult it is.

They’re byproducts, not the cause. The cause is two other things underneath.

Looking back, I’ve clearly seen that I was able to keep posting almost every day because of joy and systems.

It’s simple, really: if you love what you do, you keep doing it.

People often don’t take simple ideas seriously, but I can’t stress enough how important it is that if you want to build something consistently, you need to choose something that brings you joy.

Joy in creating. Joy in sharing. Joy in thinking about it. Joy in discussing it.

This is my Sunday evening. Writing this newsletter instead of sinking into the couch with the new show we’re watching on Apple TV (Severance).

I genuinely love almost everything about building Growth by Visuals. I love talking or writing about it, and I love doing so with a nice visual.

So I actually want to spend my Sunday evening like this. It’s not forced. It’s intentional. It’s authentic.

But joy is only half of the equation.

Because in every job, in every endeavour, even if you love most of it, some parts will suck.

And for those parts, you need systems.

If you can find all the areas you don’t like and automate them, or delegate them to AI, you become automagically consistent and disciplined (and the hustle gurus will love you).

I dislike a lot about social media, actually. And I haven’t perfected it yet, but I’ve spent a big chunk of my rare time building automated systems.

The first big thing I encountered was needing to show up manually every day in my social media apps.

I hated it.

So I spent a lot of time finding solutions for that. And there are many. But many cost a pretty penny that I didn’t want to invest yet.

I ended up using a social media scheduler called Publer, which is one of the five free tools I used to grow to 100k followers on Instagram in a year.

(I describe all of these five tools in my Visual Starter Kit, if you’re interested)

By now, my needs and wishes have grown, and I’ve built my own custom social media scheduler that I’ll walk you through next time.

For now, the takeaway is this: the key to anything sustainable is the golden duo of joy and systems.

Talk soon,

Hidde

P.S. I’ve outworked the birds. Maybe I’m enjoying this more than they enjoy their singing.