Having Clarity on Consistency

To Diversify – How important is it ?

Hand in hand with learning, if you stick to only doing what you know, or what you are good at, you may quickly find that you’re only good at one thing. We need to be agile, nimble, and interested in many different things. Otherwise, you could get stuck in a job or career you don’t love, or that goes with the times. Think of the taxi driver threatened by Uber or the customer service person replaced by a chatbot. This thought has got me to a point where I wanted to write about consistency and is it just about continuing to do the same thing over and over or keep improving.

To many people, consistency means to be able to do something/ anything repeatedly for a period of time. It could be either for good or bad, depending on each person's own perception. My very early memories with consistency goes back to my school days when I ensured, year on year, that my dad had to write apology letters to the teachers for my incorrigible behavior in school. Parents & teacher meetings was a nightmare.

More than me, he was excited when I was about to join my under graduation, mainly because colleges usually didn't have the parents & teachers meeting. We dreaded it very badly. Well, It was a transition phase from school to college, from boy to adolescence, from uniform to torn jeans, and white canvas shoes to flip flops, from kiddish behavior to 'leave me alone' attitude and with this, the behavior transitions as well.

My dad was surprised with the way I showed the transition. I was consistent and I was improving, the teachers no longer called my dad - It was directly the principal!

That was just the beginning of it all, when I hardly knew anything about observing or learning through observation. Don't we all grow up learning from our mistakes? Looking back in my life - the above case is something that I want to pick to understand about consistency. It gives me a question straight away – is consistency about sticking to something for a long time or improving from that to the next stage?

While I took the old example to understand if ever I was consistent, I want to take another example to understand if I am being consistent. Recently started running – thanks to my colleagues who run a lot, motivated me instead of laughing at me when I feared to run for more than 15 minutes at stretch. I took up a challenge to do 1.2 KMS every day for seven days, which is running for 10 minutes, and subsequently doubling the efforts in the next week. By this, I was stated to do 84 KMS in 28 tracks. The task looked absolutely doable but I was not able to do it off with ease, it took me some time – cramping, abdominal pain and what not ?But, while I was not following the “plan”, I was just running randomly, and If I recollect while it was my 22^nd track, did my first 5K, and I had to pinch myself to believe it.

When I completed the 84 KMS in the first month, people were appreciating me and I liked that. I was thinking in a direction to ensure those appreciations don’t stop! The goal was to run more than 84 KMS in the next month to continue getting those. I kept a target of 110 KMS and I achieved that as well, and was able to do a 14 KMS run, and this was the beginning of the downfall. I realized that I took this to my head. For the month which followed, increased my target to 130 KMS and here was when I started realizing how bad my consistency was, or rather learnt that consistency is not just continuing to do the same thing over and over again. I failed my targets and was able to do only 60 odd KMS – mainly because I was lazy to start working. I was back to the “happy –go- lucky” and the “I have anyway done a 14 KMS run, this is easy to do” attitude.

Consistency is not as simple as saying -"to be able to do something repeatedly", it is complete only when there is consistency in the thought process, backed by the consistency in the planning, consistency in the implementation, consistency in the endurance and consistency in the improvement and all being synchronous with each other.

Consistency in our action is extremely important and by far the hardest and what separates the best from the ordinary. People claim that when we start seeing results, it becomes an addiction - I wonder! I feel, the process of transition from making a routine to a habit, is by far the hardest because when we start seeing results, initially the mind gets into a sense of complacence and a sense of urgency. Two danger catalysts together in an equation to get better. These catalysts bring  in more damage by allowing a person to become more over confident making him/her forget even the process. Overconfidence is nothing but forgetting the pace at which the process must progress and we start thinking about accomplishment. Instead, Overconfidence must in fact be the driver of the function called “process” and accomplishment will be an outcome of the function.

I think the best possible way out of this, is to pay utmost care while strategizing the plan, and just have consistency in the belief on the process. Honestly, out of experiencing both the sides of being inconsistent and consistent - I am saying that while we are inconsistent, our efforts go in vain even before we can realize, and by the time we realize, it becomes like a ground zero start again.

I agree most of us are worried about being spiritually connected. No one has an answer to which is the best way of living this life, or what are we supposed to do. But, I am sure, If in our chosen path we are able to be consistent, that by itself is a Spiritual connect establishment.

Where does life start? Where and how does it end? Is this the right path? Is this the right journey? no one knows!

Paths will change, the journey will eventually end,
if one realizes the change, you will wake up from the mental delusion/confusion