If you’re aiming to be successful in life, in whichever way you seem fit, and if you’re reading this blog in the first place, there’s a high chance you’ve already looked up something along the lines of “how to succeed in life”, right? Allow me to ask this: how often is “consistency” mentioned or highlighted?
From my personal experience it often snaps between the opposites – either “not mentioned nearly enough” and “…consistency matters most! (in the end)”. That in itself is confusing enough as it is. But let’s add a little bit about “routine” to that mix: in the likely chance that you follow about one spirituality-themed site or at least one celebrity or influencer, who’s remotely spiritually inclined (speak: “deep”), then it’s very likely you’ve come across the saying “Routine kills creative thought” or “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal”. How much does that resonate with you?
As someone, who spent most of his life scheduled and/or organized as much and as tidy as possible and still spends a lot of time trying to make routine out of the most trivial tasks, BUT ultimately pursues growth and success in life, these two aspects/thoughts shook me quite deeply, each in its own way and direction, respectively. Hence where the inspiration for this post came from.
Let’s start with saying, that we can all agree that consistency is surely an important factor for success, correct? Be it changing/adjusting your sleep schedule; trying to gain/lose weight through a new, healthy, adjusted diet; getting your work done sooner/better/faster, etc. Making a habit of such steps is very likely to get you the results/success you desire. But how long before that consistency becomes routine? …suddenly has a noticeable “negative” ring to it, huh? That’s the reaction I had to that sentence, anyway. (Let me just re-adjust the balance by saying, that that has a lot to do with the stigmatisation of the word (Routine) in and of society itself, which is NOT the point of this article, but felt like it needed to be addressed). But it did make me think just where the line between being consistent and “surrendering to routine” lies. I would arguably say that consistency, as a term and action, involves growth; a certain action/activity; movement. More importantly I feel it involves a certain level of conscious awareness, mindfulness and focus directed at a specific task. Whereas routine incorporates something like an “auto-pilot” – where consciousness takes its hands off the wheel of mind and, prays be, lets the body take full control of itself.
This also ties in well with our human biology, specifically neurology – not to get into overly scientific terms, but our nervous system (speak “consciousness” and “memory” works very much like that – a part of it is designed to quickly gather new information and “learn” (is active, focused), while another big part is best suited to execute and almost passively, with little to no awareness, process or recreate the stored (learned) information (for example, make a specific movement of a limb).
An example in practice of this would be, if you sleep over your alarm, then take any necessary action to get to work as fast as possible and arriving with that feeling of “I don’t even know how I made it so fast.” That is where routine still comes in very handy. Deeply stored information – (frequent) habits – need considerably less energy to execute, compared to having to acknowledge, be aware and consciously make an action, for example.
But back to the connection to success – the world, as it is nowadays, strives towards “consistent growth and progress”; “quantity over quality”, as it seems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is surely reaffirming from a growth and (business) advancement perspective. But as we know “too much of a good thing can easily turn bad“. Gathering from my observations we are beginning to direct more and more towards a “quality over quantity” mindset (or at least we ought to). This is beginning to have a much more positive effect both for us as individuals (with our individual health, spiritual-emotional wellbeing and even purpose) as well as society (consisting of individuals) and the world as a whole.
Therefore my takeaway would be: do the things you love doing and enjoy the most (as long as it’s not hurting or hindering you or anyone else, of course), even if it’s only one or two things, but do it as wholeheartedly, aware and focused as possible. Quite literally everyone can benefit from it!
Some more thoughts “to debate”: Just how different are “consistency” and “routine” to you? Are they actually similar? Or even the same thing with different terms? Should we perhaps “routinise consistency” or “consistently make use of routine”? Wordplays aside, what is your take on these topics? Do you prefer one expression over the other or do they ring similarly to you? Do you have any stories of consistency or routine from your life? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
Moment in time 