Consistency is apparently the not so secret ingredient to everything. Health, creativity, business, sports, music - everything worth doing must be done consistently. Within the same 24 hours that we have been bestowed with, we must do good things repeatedly if we want to get results.
You know who else is consistent? A serial killer. Or that neighbour who blares bhajans on their loudest speaker every morning. Twitter trolls are pretty consistent. And so are groups that gather to gossip.
Consistency is not the divine methodology to all round human success. It is just a behavioral tool that we may or may not use. It is certainly not a whip to flagellate yourself with, every time the C-word comes up in online discourse, which is 3413 times a day.
Do you secretly brand yourself as inconsistent? Did your parents think of consistency as the only marker of good behaviour - waking up every day at the same time, brushing, bathing, studying, praying? Do you find yourself thinking, ‘if only I could be consistent… I could be fitter/richer/successful and prolific in my creative life’?
Welcome to my thorough examination of consistency. We will meditate on it until it stops feeling like a confusing matter of shame or a holy solution to all unfulfilled dreams, and starts feeling like a satisfying rhythm we employ in some parts of our life, and forget about in others.
Some of you may know that I’m on a 100 Day Project of sharing my words online for 100 days straight. It’s day 70 and it feels awfully dull right now. I hope I get my mojo back soon, but I haven’t stopped. In the last ten days, I’ve been posting whatever feels doable on a given day. I have posted on Instagram, Substack Notes, and even on LinkedIn (!) for the first time. (I guess the project is still helping me expand my horizon, even at its dullest.)
Projects like these push you to understand how you can be consistent, but more importantly, what consistency even means.
Consistency channelizes our bubbling energy into things that actually matter to us. It helps us devote ourselves to slow processes that build our creative, financial, or actual muscle. Consistency is famous for having a compounding effect, which means the longer we stick to a good habit, the more positive effects we get to soak in.
Consistency builds recognition and relationships. Between you and your body at the daily yoga class, between the writer and the reader through a weekly column, or as Mary Oliver put it: there would be no passion, no romance, if Romeo and Juliet did not meet in the moonlight-swept orchards consistently.
Who would you trust? A guy who texts you everyday, or a guy who texts you once in a drunk moon? A newspaper that arrived on your doorstep every day or whenever it wanted to? (Okay best not to trust newspapers these days.)
Consistency creates trust. But its insane popularity has brought too much distrust and commitment phobia into our self-image. Especially for neurodivergent, chronically ill, menstruating, mothering folks - consistency is a joke. A cruel one. What do you mean I must do something - the same way - every day - when my body and my mind and my focus is changing drastically every few hours?
Consistency is not equally possible for everyone. I wish parents and teachers and coaches of all kinds will swallow this truth and never spit around the C-word as if it is duh..so obvious. It requires a lot of environmental and psychological support to be consistent, not just will power.
Growing up, at least for us millennials, good habits were equivalent to a good character. We thought only ideal girls and boys are capable of consistently achieving good grades, sports trophies, and character certificates. Consistency was synonymous with being perfect. But the truth is - consistency is the opposite of perfectionism. It requires us to lower our standards and increase our tolerance for ourselves. It helps us become more aware of our needs. Consistency is not about being equally productive everyday, but honouring your unique needs, every unique day.
Nobody tells us that consistency is more about getting back on the path than about sticking to the path. It is about accepting that we will digress and stray and get lost. It is about finding a path worth getting back to again and again and again.
Imagine if you were still sticking to the habits your younger self vowed to develop, for example: reading non-fiction books everyday. You would not discover that you love fiction and poetry, or that you don’t just want to read, you want to write.
Consistency is not a static habit tracker to be crossed every day until you die. It is dynamic and seasonal. Especially when it comes to creativity, consistency has a peculiar behaviour:
When you create consistently, you will feel oddly empowered.
With power, you will make changes to your life. And when your life changes, how can you continue being consistent in the same way? After every growth phase, you need time to build routines that send you into your next growth phase.
For us neurodivergent ones, our persistence, our slightly insane optimism, our penchant for hyper-focusing into our special interests - matters more than consistency. Despite failing so many times, we refuse to give up. That’s a consistency of courage.
We are consistent at dreaming and growing and accepting ourselves. I can almost bet that every person who thinks they are inconsistent has several consistent habits: for example: caring for someone, walking the dog, writing thoughtful messages, reading newsletters, making time to meet friends. If you are super consistent at living without harming others, it’s more than enough.
From my experience of writing morning pages for 8 years, the only thing I’ve ever been super consistent at - I can say that consistency consists of more forgiveness than determination. I’ve been able to get up in the morning and write because I forgave myself whenever I missed a day or two. And I allowed myself to write shit. Of course sometimes the shit turned to gold. That’s the real power of consistency - you try your luck so many times that eventually the cat of success arrives on its own soft toes towards you.
Consistency can be boring though. My god, sometimes it is SO boring to walk everyday, to write essays every week, to plan your finances every month. But we can make it fun. Consistency and novelty can coexist. By keeping my 100 day project fun and flexible in terms of what and where I can post - I could keep at it even when my energy or confidence was low.
Consistency is a lifestyle change that requires tremendous self-determination and self-forgiveness. But the self itself is too narrow to define consistency. Consistency needs community. Isn’t it easy to consistently stay up late when your friends stay up late? If everybody around you consumes without creating, is it surprising that you find it hard to carve out time for your own creativity?
Sometimes, we don’t need to write or make art consistently. We don’t need to travel every quarter or shop for clothes every month. Some actions are meant to be inconsistent, spontaneous, singular. Not everything needs repetition.
But whatever you’d like to repeat, may you have the patience to build a community around it. Or have even just one accountability partner. And while ‘daily’ is the most famous cadence amongst consistency enthusiasts, there are other rhythms: weekly, monthly, or the one that my brain finds hard to understand: fortnightly. We must have mercy on ourselves and not cram all the good habits in one day, or even one week.
Consistency, and I promise this is the last time I’ll use this c-word, is a commitment to your future self, that you fulfill by being your present self, and gently moving forward - with other present selves.
Thank you, dear reader, for being your present self with me. Please do let me know what shifted in you after reading this? Every reply, every comment, every restack keeps me going.
Love,
Raju
If you want to explore what consistency can look like for your creative life, do join me and Vimal Chitra at CoCreateClub. It’s a space where your creativity is celebrated through real, concrete, soul-fulfilling action.
We offer you creative exercises, prompts, and lots of silence to focus on your next creative goal. Last day to join: 6th May. Details and registration: here.
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