Minimum viable consistency

Great outcomes come from great consistency. An overnight success requires a decade of making. This is entirely at odds with one of the most human of all human traits, impatience. Impatience leads us to undervalue consistency. Worse still, even when we embrace consistency, impatience will trip us up.

Impatience is a trickster. It will convince you that doing something is not enough. "Great outcomes require great efforts," says impatience. "Exert yourself, human!" he goes on, before asking how you can expect anything worthwhile to come from something that doesn't even feel hard. So, you up the ante. Bring the heat. Put it all on the line.

And then what?

Nothing much. So you start thinking it's useless. You gave it everything, but nothing happened. And you're supposed to do this every day? Impossible. This must not be for you, you think, before discarding the idea and giving up on the dream.

Did you catch it? Impatience's devilishly clever trick so often trips us up. Makes us believe that it is about the size of our effort. But that's not how consistency creates results. Consistency is about making small, but regular deposits.

Quantifying effort

I like numbers. So here are some to help illustrate the point.

Say you start out today with zero. Every day you show up and you deposit 10. It doesn't matter what it is you're doing. If it's running, lifting, writing, reading, building a tiny empire, the mechanics are all the same. You have a dream, and every day you show up and dedicate an effort of 10 to make that dream happen. 

Why 10? Because an effort of 10 is decent. Nothing special, but it's something you know you can do.

Add all your effort together and after a year you've dedicated a total effort of 3650. Not bad.

In a decade, it's 36,500 and you can still spend your bonus days doing whatever. Not bad at all.

Let's say impatience got to you. Instead of a sustainable effort of 10, impatience tricked you into going for 20. Every single day. Because you want results, dammit. Rather than merely showing up and doing the deed, you're now busting a gut to get in the required effort every day.

A year in your total effort score is 7300. That's twice as much as the more sustainable option.

After a decade it's 73,000. Still double the sustainable road. Can't argue with maths, right? Seems like it might be worth it.

Diminishing returns of effort

There's this story that I never stop thinking about. It's from Derek Sivers and it's called Relax for the same result. You should read the entire thing — it'll only take a few minutes — to really understand his point. But here's a quote:

So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.

And what a difference in experience! To go the same distance, in about the same time, but one way leaves me exhausted, and the other way, rejuvenated.

Derek found that output quickly decouples from input. The return on additional effort points is not nearly the same as what you get from your first effort points. This seems important. It is important.

We already did the maths on effort points. Double the effort, double the points. Awesome. But chances are, you're not really after effort points. More likely you're chasing what I call awesomeness points.

Awesomeness is the reward for putting in the effort. If you want to become a writer, you get writing awesomeness points every time you do some writing. Want to learn the guitar? Well then put a little effort into learning to play the guitar to collect guitar playing awesomeness points.

Derek's story taught me that when it comes to what matters — awesomeness points — extra effort is a poor investment. He found that doubling his effort only gave a 4% boost. That's not much. Let's do some simple calculations to illustrate what it means for us.

In the case that we keep the effort at a sustainable level of 10, let's keep it simple and say that we're rewarded with an equal number of awesomeness points. That means we're rewarded with 3650 awesomeness points after a year of showing up. 36,500 after a decade.

But what if we double our effort? Because of diminishing returns, as illustrated so nicely by Derek, you don't get double the awesomeness points. You only get a 4% increase. That's 10.4 awesomeness points. Not a whole lot more than ten flat.

After a year, you now have 3796 awesomeness points. 146 extra awesomeness points is all you have to show for all that extra effort.

A decade in it's 37,960 versus 36,500. 1460 points. All that extra effort for a rounding error.

Effort versus consistency

That's not all. You might think that "hey, I'll take those 1460 points" because they will make all the difference. They might. But it's more likely that they won't. Far more likely.

Increasing effort reduces your chances of being consistent. The harder something is, the more likely it is that you will stop doing it. I've yet to see someone quantify this relationship, but in my experience the likelihood of dropping out corresponds to the increase in effort almost one to one. Increasing effort with 50% reduces your chances of being consistent by 50%. 

Time for some more maths. When handling probabilities, we can use "expected value" to compare different approaches. Let's say that when you're giving an effort of 10, your chance of being consistent for a year is 50%. But, increase it by 50% to 15, and your chances of being consistent decrease. They are now 25%.

I'll be generous here and say that you can gain Derek's additional 4% increase in awesomeness points by just upping the effort to 15. That's gotta mean it's worth it, right? Let's find out.

With a daily effort of 10 for a year, you earn 3650 awesomeness points. But, there's a 50/50 chance you won't be consistent. That you give up. In that case, you're left with 0. The expected value of this scenario is 3650 * 0.5 which equals 1825. Which makes sense, because, on average, half the times you try, you'll fail. That's what a 50% probability means.

Up the effort to 15 though, and the potential earnings are now 3796 awesomeness points. But now the probability split is 25/75. And you still get nothing if you give up. So the expected value of this scenario is 3796 * 0.25 which equals 949. That's less than 1825. Just about half, in fact.

Now, do you see how impatience is a devil in disguise? Gung ho doesn't pay off. Instead, it comes with a cost.

Minimum viable consistency

For your next big thing, don't try to identify how much you're capable of doing consistently. Ask instead how little you can get away with. The least amount of effort required to keep you on the right trajectory. 

I call that minimum viable consistency. You should always aim for minimum viable consistency when starting something new. That's where you'll find the highest expected value.

Postscript: Even after reading all of this, you probably still think — as a result of social conditioning or whatever it is — that hours is the correct unit to measure minimum viable consistency. It's not. Consider brushing your teeth. All it takes is a couple of minutes. Imagine what you'd look like if you didn't bother.

Sometimes a couple of minutes is all it takes. And even if you end up discovering that the minimum viable consistency to make meaningful progress was a little more, that's also progress. If you'd aimed for an hour a day and dropped out, you'd never know that 20 minutes was what it took. Instead your stupid human brain will trick you into thinking that an hour a day wasn't enough, and that it's impossible. Even though the only reason it didn't work out was because you made it too hard for yourself.