“Progress is impossible without
change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
George Bernard Shaw
Jim Rohn was
an American business philosopher who had a positive influence on a countless
number of people in many countries around the world with nothing more than
certain principles, plain wisdom and practical truths.
Though he wrote
and published many useful books on those principles, yet the cornerstone of his
entire philosophy is based on one straightforward sentence: “If you will
change, everything will change for you.”
After a deep
thought on that one quote, I realize how promising and hopeful it really is. Therefore,
this article will prod us— not to change our entire lives but—to change with
regard to just one principle: the truth of consistency.
In this
life, the people we respect the most are those who are somehow able to do the
necessary things more consistently than us. They are the ones with a level of
consistency we wish we could bring into our own affairs.
They are the
ones who show up and deliver day after day while everyone else struggles with
lethargy, procrastination and indifference.
They are the
ones who seemed to have figured out the secret of successful living; they are
the ones with a Midas touch: the ones on top of their games.
They are the
ones who don’t seem to have the time to complain or dwell on past performances.
They are the ones highly focused on the process of constant and never ending
improvement.
As proven in
the best researches available, consistency is noted to be a key trait of this
crop of people; consistency is undoubtedly, their magic bullet as Tynan, the
author Superhuman by Habit writes: “Consistency is everything.”
Again, my
message today is simply to encourage us to learn to show up as the best show up
in important areas of their lives. Put another way: I am urging us to be far more
consistent than we have ever been.
Perhaps, this is the only key lesson
we need to implement for everything to fall into place. Perhaps, this is all we
need to do to step up our game for good.
Let’s give it a try in response to the
words of an American historian, Edward Everett Hale who said:
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot
do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I
will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
For example:
To be a better student, suspend
improving everything else, just improve one thing: show up more consistently
with your deep regular study than ever before.
Do that long enough and you will be
surprised at the depth of understanding which you can uncover. Apply the same
principle to any other key area of your life, one step at a time.
Finally,
understand that we don’t have to change everything at once to see a radical
improvement that we envision; we just need to start showing up more
consistently than we have ever done.
