When Consistency Is the Key You Just Can’t Find
And how knowing this has fingers on the worm of everything you do
You know that worm people always talk about birds getting in the early hours? I don’t think it’s “out there” for us to find somewhere. I believe we each have one wriggling around inside our skulls.
The lucky among us know how to respond accordingly to its tickles: the reassurance we each need to regularly “get up and go” will likely get the results we long for.
Without this skill, mine continues to mock me for all I haven’t achieved. All because of the one missing little four-syllable word making me chisel away at the bedrock of my everyday life.
Consistency.
My worm isn’t the only one who knows I have it in me to be consistent and reach my goals.
Why else would I wake up at stupid AM with ‘idea diarrhoea’ that forces me to let it rip onto my journal?
I become a self-appointed critic when watching YouTube videos and decisively clicking out when it gets bad. I may also sigh when listening to podcasters who haven’t edited properly and have left listeners with really long attention-killing silences between hearing people talk.
I believe I know everything but I haven’t even done anything. Unlike me, they have the courage to put themselves out there.
Who am I?
And, yeah. Maybe I do have a repertoire of UX feedback I could give creators to help them improve (stop me from dropping their content immediately) but it wouldn’t be from the POV of another creator.
I haven’t earned that title yet — and I know why.
I can’t consistently follow through with plans because I don’t know my limits.
I set myself unrealistic goals based on equally outrageous expectations of myself, commit to them, can’t keep them up in the long-term, and eventually hit ‘eject’ in the pilot’s seat.
That — along with my ADHD — stops me from being able to finish most things I start. This means I’m never able to know how far I can see something through until my actual skill stops me from progressing and I need to level myself up.
It’s the main thing that holds me back from reaching my fingers into my ear and catching my worm and keeping my 1,277 YouTube video ideas sleeping inside my notebook.
James Clear explains this the best with his concept of ‘being in motion vs. taking action’:
Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practising.
This is something I’ve ingrained into me so much that I can notice myself doing it at the start of trying something new. During the planning stage when all of my self-doubts creep in and spike the punch.
In reality, I don’t have the fear of taking on anything but more the fear of becoming excited by ideas that exceed my abilities and taking on too much. I’ve had too many lived experiences of rage quitting for the benefit of keeping my mental health intact.
If anything, it’s telling me how much I really want this. So much I want to have everything planned and easily laid out for me before my index finger takes the plunge into my keyboard and hits ‘publish’ on my first video.
I just need to find out a way to get over that fear and Cinderella my ‘motion’ into ‘action.
And, fortunately, I think I’ve discovered how.
How I’m learning consistency — for real this time
I don’t think the worm in my head will calm its flailing body down until I’ve finally pulled it — and the proverbial finger — out and made something of myself. Or at least make a start.
When consistency is the key you just can’t find, you need to know that habits have your back. I shared my ride or dies that are helping me get sh*t done in 2023.
Hopefully, they’ll become something more to build on and forever stop me from being consistently inconsistent.
Bet you saw that one coming, didn’t you?