Tenacious Repetition is the Big Deal

“Repetition of the same chant, the same affirmations leads to belief, and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”_Claude M. Bristol

One of the suboptimal realities of human life is that too many of us are inconsistent, in areas where consistency matters, most of the time.  

To confirm that assertion, look around you and listen to what people claim to be their main wants—either implicitly or explicitly—then observe closely to see if their behaviours align with those claims. 

In a lot of cases, there is often a mismatch between people’s aspirations and their exertions.   

So to be among the committed few who are really sincere to their own hearts, we need to become relentless with the art of purposeful repetition. 

By that, I mean our persistent capacity to do what we need to do, when we need to do it, whether we have the impulse to do it or not. 

This is a process of repeating the basics again and again, both during the winter and the during summer; it is the discipline of loving the work and doing it, both when we feel excited to do it and when we feel bored out of our minds.  

In other words, we should be bias for the process of repetition that will invariably lead to the outcome we desire as Zig Ziglar, the author of ‘See You at the Top’ said: 

“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”

Commit to Tenacious Repetition

“The eight laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.”_John Wooden

Do you have a resolution this year?

If yes, write it down and don’t worry about it

Then create a plan for throwing in the work that is necessary. Create a schedule for putting in a volume of work on the things that are relevant to achieve the goal.

The goal is just an event; an occurrence that is not immediately up to you. However, the repetition of a few critical inputs is what you have control over— right away.

Understand that repetition of the same relevant action is what develops into a habit. And enabling habits are what will help turn any lofty resolution into an attractive reality. 

By the foregoing, I like to think that setting up a system for putting in the work is far more important than choosing the goal. 

If you disagree, honestly answer the following questions.

If we ignore the goal and focus only on the tactical repetitions; won’t we attain the goal?

But if we daydream all day about the goal and become lax on doing the boring, repetitive work that must precede good outcome; are we going to make it?

Since habits are defined as repeated performances, we want to make sure that the actions we repeat on a daily basis are relevant to the outcomes we want.  

Therefore, let’s commit ourselves to tenacious repetition of necessary disciplines, if we want exciting results to be ours—in the end.  

Let’s Be Wary of Small Errors

“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. Failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”_Jim Rohn

I once read an article written by the author of ‘Willpower Doesn’t Work,’ on how fatal the consequences of certain little lapses in life can turn out to be. 

Ben Hardy narrated the sad occurrence that happened in 1979 due to a little error of just two degrees. An airplane that was well-loaded with people began flying two degrees off the right coordinates.

Eventually, those tiny degrees of errors put the plane away from its desired destination by more than forty-five kilometers apart in the course of its journey.

Worse still, the unexpected destination was nothing like the sightseeing adventures the passengers had originally intended as the plane flew straight toward Mount Erebus: the dangerous zone of active volcanic pulse.

Long story short: the mere two degrees of errors led to the fatal end of more than 255 lives aboard. A simple oversight started as something trivial but it ended as an unforgettable tragedy because it was left uncorrected minutes after minutes. 

To quote the words of Ben Hardy from that painful story: “Small things—if not corrected—become big things, always.”

The above narrative is a negative analogy human life. Small errors of judgment that continue uncorrected will accumulate into a big problem, every time. 

However, on the positive side, small wise choices we make every day, if they continue unblemished will accumulate into something great, without fail.

Now, the essence of this article is to goad us to examine our lives for any such error that could give birth to outcomes of lethal consequences down the line.

So let’s think deeper to ascertain that we have a proper-control system to steer us toward a desirable destination of health, spirituality and fulfillment at the end of our brief sojourn on earth.

You should never be too careless with little lapses in your life. Read the following the words of Alan S. Kesselheim, the author of ‘Let Them Paddle’ to get this point direct from his astute observation of human history. He said: 

“Small mistakes, the lack of care, little accidents, and somewhere a tipping point is passed and things go badly wrong. Expedition history brims with tragedies built out of incremental missteps.”

Finally, we need to understand that little leaks can sink even the biggest ship. Therefore let’s be proactive to patch any weak spots that could degenerate into a leak, and subsequently impair the voyage of our life.

Master the Art of Showing Up

“Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.”_Elizabeth Gilbert

The secret of self-confidence lies in showing up consistently to do what needs to be done in key areas of life.

And as it turns out, the most effective people among us are those who have mastered the art of showing up; they are the ones who show up every day. 

Based on the foregoing, I think we can agree that it is good thing to always strive to make ourselves show up better in important areas of our lives.

The author of the international best-selling book, ‘Atomic Habits,’ James Clear has an insight for us in this direction. 

In order to master the art of showing up, James Clear says we should only aim to be one percent better, every day. 

Yes, you read that right. We don’t need to try and be hundred percent better on any single day, but we need to try and be at least, one percent better, every single day.

Be wary of pushing yourself to the very limit of your capacity on any one day, which can, and almost invariably will lead to burnout, and failure to show up the very next day. 

It is far better to improve by a tiny percentage everyday than to make sporadic moves in progress every now and then.

To avoid the insidious danger of showing up only whenever we are motivated, we should learn to show up every time by making consistency the hallmark of our process.  

This means we need to make every session incredibly easy to do. 

So if for example there is a book you’ve been putting aside for months due to its volume, now change your mindset from wanting to read the whole book to just showing up to read at least a page per day. 

Do this today, tomorrow, and then the next day.

If you do this for 300 days in a row, not only will you end up finishing the book, you will have established the character-identity of someone who can show up every day for a non-urgent, important thing.

Though there is nothing quite remarkable about this slow progress, but what is remarkable about it is that it helps put a good behavior on autopilot in our lives. 

This strategy can help turn us into the type of person who not only shows up every day but also the type of person who shows up no matter what, especially when it is easier not to.

You see, optimization comes easy after standardization is already in place. Improvement in any area is easy for someone who already has the habit of showing up every day in that area.

Showing up is essential to anything worthwhile in life; showing up unremittingly is powerful indeed because when we truly master the art of showing up, we can get good at almost anything else. No wonder an American writer, Woody Allen believes that, “showing up is 80 percent of life.”

Set Up Your Environment to Make Good Actions Easy

“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”_John Irving

Today, I want to share a strategy on how we can make good habits easier to install and bad habits a little difficult to indulge. 

This simple strategy involves the use of friction as a means to an end.  By its use, we eliminate existing friction to give good behaviours a clear smooth passage but we create additional friction to hinder the growth of weakening bad habits. 

On the importance of habits and the reason for diligence about the subject, an American psychologist, Williams James once wrote as follows: 

“We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”

So if we want to make good habits easy, all we need to start with is: reduce the friction on the path of purpose by removing anything that can get in the way of our best intentions. 

By the same token, if we want to stop doing something less desirable, all we need to start with is: increase the friction on the path of purpose by enabling our resistance to self-destructive behaviours.

All mortals need dependable supports in their moments of weakness. That is why a carefully designed environment is necessary, even for the strongest amongst us. 

In this direction, James Clear, the author of 'Atomic Habits' writes: 

“The people who exhibit the most self-control are not actually those who have superhuman willpower; they’re the people who are tempted the least.” 

For such people, if they don’t want to watch much television, they don’t rely on raw willpower to prevent the formation of a low-value habit; instead they proactively unplug the TV and keep its cabinet locked.

The silent but essential insight here is this: as imperative as doing the right thing now is, doing the right thing, the next time is far more important.

This is because habit is basically defined as repeated performance. What we do once or once in a while doesn’t count for much in the context of habits. Habits are about what we do every single time. 

Repetition is the essence of habits, and for many people, frictions determine the fate of not just the present action but that of the next series of actions.

When we set up our environment for a meaningful purpose, we are priming it to make desirable behaviours the default behaviours. In other words, by removing obstructive frictions, we are making good actions, the easy actions to do.

For example:  If we want to make reading a habit, instead of putting TV set in multiple rooms in our house, we should put stacks of books in multiple rooms in our house.

This kind of setup gives regular study a clear smooth passage.

It is so because—too often—what we are surrounded by, can make a difference in the kind of behaviour we actually engage in, as the Stanford professor BJ Fogg writes:

 “If you pick the right (small) behaviour and sequence it right, then you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow. It will just happen naturally, like a good seed planted in a good spot.”

Now, whatever it is that we may want to achieve, we just need to proactively design an environment where the undesirable actions become the ones that are difficult to take on, while the necessary actions are proactively made easy to do.

Understand that when we harness the discipline to design an environment that enables a specific, meaningful aim, then our preferred habits will happen almost effortlessly. 

Therefore, set up your environment to make good actions easy, going forward.

Turn Your Self-Delusion into Self-Discipline

“The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.”_Plato

When we fail to act in line with our principles, values and goals, we are not being true to ourselves. And to be incongruent is to live in disharmony.

We create internal conflict every time our actions don’t match with our professed intentions as the author of ‘Unshakable Character,’ Jim Rohn says: “Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.”

For most of us, this usually takes the form of giving in to distractions by doing what feels good at the moment, instead of doing the right things that we know deep down we really ought to do. 

Though we often want to justify our behaviors and convince ourselves we're still on track, but a deeper reflection would reveal the truth of our situation; we’re in romance with self-delusion.

Without question, our behaviors directly translate into our results. Even with best of intentions, to get ahead, we need to commit ourselves fully to self-discipline. Every true success is a product of responsibility, ownership and accountability. 

To believe in something, and refuse to act with purpose to ensure its realization is the sure path to cognitive dissonance; the direct consequence of self-delusion.

 

A Day Is a Slice of Life

A day is not just a tangible slice of our lives; it is also a miniature eternity.

If we goof away our time in one day and still think it doesn’t matter at all, then we are in a state of delusion. 

This is so for the simple reason that our entire lives are made up of a fixed number of days. Once a day slips away, the downward slope has been ignited.

Think about this: If we repeat our sub-optimal days, for the next five years, it is pretty easy to predict the direction of our lives; isn’t it?

Now, we need to be honest with ourselves and face the truth of our personal situations. We need to admit that we procrastinate a lot. 

We need to admit that we engage in low value activities at the expense of high value ones. And we need to admit that we rarely make the most of our days. 

It is only by being accountable enough to recognize our flaws can we begin to correct them. In the words of Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, “I seek the truth...it is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance that does harm.” 

In order words, we should decide to turn self-deception into self-discipline by forcing ourselves to do the things we need to do, when we need to do them, whether we feel like it or not.

At the end of the day, the only person who can hold us accountable for anything is ourselves. And to turn out well in life, we must develop the mental honesty to take full responsibility for our results by thinking right and equally acting in accordance with our positive thoughts.

In conclusion:  we have to stop lying to ourselves by turning every suboptimal element of self-delusion into a building block of self-discipline, going forward.