Can you finish?

I’m asking myself this same question while writing this. You’ve probably heard the story of the tortoise and the hare. If you haven’t, just go check it out. It’s amazing how that story turns out to be true most of the time. Most times, we start a ‘race’ with so much excitement but along the way, we get distracted, tired or find the race too easy and we end up being unable to complete this race.

If you know me, you probably have recognised how inconsistent I am with most things. It’s tiring thinking about how many good things have fizzled out in my life because of my inability to be consistent. It has become the one thing I have to work on becoming better at.

I feel every person faces this problem at some point in their life. I have come to believe that amongst everything, success is achieved when you are truly able to stay consistent. You might say they are other values that can bring about true success. There is hard work, discipline, creativity, seizing opportunities and many others that you believe come before consistency. I understand but give me a moment to change your mind.

There’s the cliche example of studying. To truly understand whatever material you want to study, you have to consistently create time and work on the material during this period. Yes, you have to have good studying techniques and you have to put in hard work but consistently creating this time would lead to it become a habit that would make it easier for you to do well. You cannot study once every two months when in truth, you need to be studying every week. Your effort will be next to futile and you will most likely get frustrated.

This applies to every other thing in life, especially but not limited to creatives. If you are a model, photographer, writer, musician, artist… you have to be consistent! You have to constantly create, develop and publicise your work for you to be noticed. It is not enough to just be talented anymore. You have to be consistently hardworking, you have to be consistently looking for opportunities to showcase your work and you have to be consistently developing yourself.

There are other values that are necessary to truly be successful and it’d be a complete fallacy to say consistency is the only thing required but it is definitely a must to have on your way. Tell me though… do you agree or not?