Consistency for Makers

Practice makes perfect. You probably heard it a million times, but when people start saying something at every turn it’s easy to overlook it. When was the last time you applied this adage proactively? We all have things we want to get better at: doing them consistently is fundamental to ease the learning curve.

Growth is created when you manage to both over-promise and over-deliver. The secret in achieving this feat is to base yourself on temporal frequency. Don’t say “I’m going to talk to 50 customers per week”. Instead, talk to at least 1 customer per day, or 1 customer per working hour if you feel pumped up. Increasing the frequency of your practice is much more powerful than increasing the delivered quantity of less frequent outputs.

“Why is it?”, you may ask. Our bodies follow a circadian rhythm, so practicing your craft on a daily basis takes advantage of this mechanism by alternating periods of intense focused work and rest. A marathoner doesn’t prepare for a marathon by jogging: the training is focused on high-intensity exercises. It’s the same thing with growth: you have to sit down and put in a high-intensity work regularly so that your results can compound into a huge amount of work.

This statement is only true for creative practice: when it comes to repetitive tasks, it’s better to batch them to perform them less regularly and free time.

When you are doing something on a daily basis you are already setting yourself apart from other practitioners who do things less often.

to be continued…