An Important Quality You Need for Progress

Other than the last week of the year, I put up a blog post every day. Whenever I speak on panels or help someone get their blog off the ground, I inevitably get asked why I post every day (or how I do it). People are surprised to find it out that it has nothing to do with page views. For me, when I’m posting every day, it’s kind of like keeping the hamster wheel moving. If I were to get lax about my posting schedule, I don’t think I could keep it up. Because I always post, I am always writing. It’s a good rhythm for me and, well, it works. Maxie’s post is spot on!

An Important Quality You Need for Progress

Guest post by Maxie McCoy

I’ve started and stopped things a million times. I’ve had great ideas that went nowhere. I’ve had bad ideas that I took too far. But when it comes to making progress (at anything), there’s one little secret to building something exciting, something successful, something meaningful: you must keep going. You gotta keep at it. Be consistent.

This weekend I got to do my favorite Saturday morning ritual with one of my favorite people: Carly. As we hugged goodbye and waited for our respective transportations to show up, I reminded her that this guest post marks four years of our #MaxieMondays (how’s this original post for a throwback??) We said there was no way. We said it felt like forever and yesterday simultaneously. And wait there’s more: Carly reminded she’s been doing this for nine years. Nine. As in twelve-months short of a decade.

What’s true for both of us in our dreams, our businesses, and our pursuits – we’ve just kept going. And you should too. There’s been plenty of weeks, nights, and days I didn’t want to write. There’s been plenty of times I haven’t wanted to create or had to squeeze a writing session into the craziest of days. Whether it was guest posts or the draft of my book, being consistent isn’t easy, but it’s always worth it. And you show consistency by showing up. By scheduling it. By refusing to miss a commitment to yourself. And by knowing that the glory of finishing will far outweigh the frustration of beginning.

Because consistent people are the ones that end up making meaningful changes or seeing real progress. Most of nothing is a one-hit wonder. Most success is ten years in the making. And rarely anything starts the same way it ends. But in the going, going and going is where you learn, refine, and eventually get to the end outcomes you hope to see.

It doesn’t matter where in your life that you’re hoping to see that kind of progress: it could be with your nerves, or with your health, or with your creativity, or your side hustle, or your communication skills. You don’t go from zero to 100 in a day. Or even a month. Unfortunately for our patience, progress happens in a million small choices and hundreds of small steps that seem meaningless, but when added together over time, they are quite meaningful.

As they say, you are what you repeatedly do. Consistency is a choice, like most things. You can choose to dabble and experiment (which I highly encourage!), and then you find that you’re energized, or you’ve found something that works for you. Eventually, the novelty will rub off, and it’ll come down to how committed you are to choosing that step, that habit, that thing that really does give you such energy time and time and time again, no matter if you want to do it then or not.

So ask yourself, what progress are you hoping to make? And take an honest look at the consistency that surrounds the small steps that would lead to that progress. How can you keep choosing to show up for yourself time and time and time again. Consistency is the key to that progress. It doesn’t have to be big choices, but it does have to be a consistent one.

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