🐢Sprinting and Consistency

Why sprinters burn out and how to build more consistency into your life

Apr 8, 2021

Hey there! It’s been a while and I’m super excited to present another edition of Growth Snacks. This is going to be fun because this article is both about growth and why you haven’t seen an article in a while. It’s a brief narrative about consistency.

If you’re someone who’s ever struggled with maintaining consistent practices or you’re looking to build more consistency, then you might like this one.

What I’ve been learning about my consistency

When it comes to success, consistency is key. I’d like to believe that success is less about the time that you wake up, but more about how consistently you can control your day once you do wake up.

My personal consistency comes in waves, fits, and starts.

I’m a sprinter. When I say that I’m a sprinter, I don’t just mean that physically. I’m a sprinter in a lot of ways.

I have a personality type that can hold really intense levels of focus and commitment over relatively shorter periods of time. This mentality impacts my work, my personal relationships, my hobbies, and even my leisure habits.

For example, I tend to avoid TV shows with long episode lists because I know there is a risk I will sprint (i.e. binge watch) to get through the content faster. I’ve avoided Mad Men, Lost, Breaking Bad, and many other iconic shows.

Sometimes, my sprinting is a forte. I operate incredibly well in chaos, on low amounts of sleep, or when you just need something hard done ASAP. It’s easy for me to deliver high-level results over a shorter time horizon.

I spend a lot of time cycling these days and if you ask me to go all-out for a mile or two, I crush it. I’ll take the shorter, grueling path all day long. It hurts like hell, but I can power through it.

Alternatively, it’s when you ask me to do 20-miles of continuous climbing that I struggle. I don’t like it. It’s a meticulous, slow, and boring process that I know I’m not good at. I might come in first on a sprint, but on a long climb, I tend to come in last.

Recently, I’ve been sucking up the long, 20-mile climb because it’s the only way to reach great heights. You can’t climb a 5,000-foot mountain in a 1-mile sprint. It takes the consistent, 20-mile dedication to reach the higher limits.

Want to know what I think about during that three-hour, punishing climb? I think about all the other places in my life that are asking for lower levels of consistent commitment over time. I think about the mountain peaks I still want to reach in my life and how, if I can’t figure out how to do smaller things more consistently, I’ll never reach the top of those mountains.

Sprinting can lead to a huge amount of overcommitment

When we look at life as a sprint, it can be easy to overcommit to things. Sprinters commit to things because we’re excited about them and we honestly feel like we can accomplish them. We ride a wave of excitement into making our commitments.

We commit to really big goals that, over a short period of time, we can definitely hit. Here are a few examples of commitments a sprinter might make:

Working out every day starting on Monday!
Reading an hour a day.
Cooking every day. No eating out!

What we’re not seeing when we make those commitments is that they will inevitably conflict with other stuff. There are curveballs that will hit us, and it’s hard to see the general fatigue that’s coming for us as well.

We end up missing one day. Then two. Before we know it, we’re in a hole! We just sprinted in a circle, back to where we started: zero. It’s one of my least favorite things.

Why we stop in the first place

When we stop doing the things we committed to, it’s not that we don’t care about them. We’ve usually just committed to too much, too fast. Then, when we were asked to choose between our commitment and something else we cared about, we quickly reprioritize based on our current set of values.

I’ve definitely thought about Growth Snacks and getting back into writing them, both for my own personal growth and the growth of others. I was simply committed to other things. I was committed to:

Getting my company Studio off to an excellent start
Investing time in my new romantic relationship
Maintaining a solid baseline of physical health and rest

All of those things are going great! Could I still have written some Growth Snacks articles and maintained those goals? Sure. Could I have written Growth Snacks articles every week? Probably not. Fun fact: I love writing these things, but they take like 8 hours. 8 hours per week for 52 weeks is NOT a sprint.

So, how do we actually build consistency?

To build consistency, we have to start out with something that we know, without a doubt, that we can manage over and over again, without dropping the ball. For most of us, that will mean starting out with something simple that we can build on.

What is the smallest commitment you can make that when you achieve it consistently, you’d be proud of yourself for maintaining it? That should be the goal! It will feel like you can do more, but you don’t need to just yet.

Here are the super simple steps:

Do something very, very small
Do that small thing consistently
Watch how it builds over time

I say “super simple;” it really isn’t. It will take more practice and discipline than you think, but it adds up! That’s how you climb a mountain! Baby steps.

We get to focus on maintaining the hell out of those baby commitments before we add anything else to the commitment plate. When we do add stuff later, we do it when we know that we can add them consistently as well.

What I committed to doing consistently:

I’ve decided to keep my commitment relatively low so that I can count on myself and others can count on it as well.

Posting bi-weekly Growth Snack articles that essentially compile stuff I’ve been learning and growing in over the trailing two weeks.
Hosting a weekly Clubhouse session at 4 PM pst every Friday called The Friday Afternoon Debrief. It’s a call where people (mostly friends) debrief what they’ve learned that week. You might be able to see how that debrief actually informs the Growth Snacks commitment. It forces me to debrief publicly, which then gives me something to write about.
I committed to maintaining that for six weeks BEFORE I add anything else to that plate.

Now, this isn’t a sprint and there is a part of me, which I know is my ego, telling me that I can do so much more to support the personal growth of myself and others. But, I get to trust that this smaller commitment, when done more consistently, will yield a bigger impact.

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to all the people who emailed, texted, tweeted, slacked, or called and verbally asked “when is the next Growth Snacks coming out,” along with the one very special reader who threatened to slash my tires and stick a potato in my exhaust if I didn’t publish one this month. You ALL have a very special place in my heart.

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💥 Things to consider:

Commit to something small. Something that you can maintain over a long period of time.
Maintain that small level of commitment for 6 weeks before you add ANYTHING else on. Seriously, just do the bare minimum because that will be hard enough.
After 6 weeks, you can add something else if you choose, but only after you’ve mastered the prior commitment.
If you dropped a commitment that you really care about, there isn’t a shortcut to restarting it. Today, tomorrow, or any day can be the day it restarts. You just have to… do it.

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That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share.

If you found this valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you aren’t already.

Cheers!

Brian ✊