The Myth of consistency

I'm writing this from a sun-drenched terrace in Mallorca, where the cicadas are providing what I can only describe as my favorite concert of nature. The Mediterranean is doing its best impression of a postcard, and I'm trying to look productive while secretly wondering if it's too early for a beer. (Spoiler: it's never too early when you're on Spanish time.)

Getting here was its own adventure. Barcelona airport this morning looked like the entire continent had simultaneously decided to take a vacation. The departure board was a masterpiece of optimism, displaying flight times that bore no resemblance to reality and somehow it feels like a miracle that our bikes showed up at the other end.

This newsletter was supposed to be written Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Then "definitely by Thursday morning." But here we are on Friday, I'm on a Mediterranean island for a friend's birthday, and I'm finally sitting down to write about something that's been gnawing at me for weeks: our collective obsession with consistency.

The irony isn't lost on me—writing about the myth of consistency while by my own standards being spectacularly inconsistent myself. But that was always the intention of this newsletter - an honest challenge of writing about stuff in my head.

It's the story we've all been sold. Show up every day. Never miss a session. Keep grinding. The magic happens in the boring middle, in the unsexy repetition, in the relentless march toward whatever goal we've pinned to our vision boards.

Having lived by that gospel for twenty years, more often than not, I seem to squeeze consistency in at the very last minute. I'd call it productive procrastination - waiting until the pressure creates enough focus to actually move. There's a weird kind of satisfaction in never missing a day - definitely type 2 fun.

But here's what I also sometimes feels about consistency: it becomes its own prison.

The easiest analogy for me is the moment your training schedule becomes more important than listening to your body. You've lost the plot and yet it's so easy to do - follow the plan, just because last week, when it was written it was the best idea on paper. The moment you're grinding just to grind—well, that's when consistency stops serving you and starts owning you.

Real consistency isn't about perfect attendance - it’s about showing up as switched on as you can be in that moment, even when that means showing up differently than planned. Arnold Schwarzenegger once described his mind being inside the muscle he was training at that moment.

The most consistent people I know aren't the ones who never miss a day. They're the ones who understand the difference between discipline and dogma, between commitment and compulsion. They know when to push through and when to pivot. They've learned that sometimes the most consistent thing you can do is be inconsistent. Your body doesn't care about your training plan. It cares about your response to stress, recovery, and adaptation. Sometimes the best training day is the one you don't do or adapt.

I'm not advocating for giving up or making excuses. There's a difference between conscious flexibility and unconscious chaos. But I am suggesting that maybe - just maybe - our obsession with never missing a day is missing the point entirely.

The entrepreneurial world loves to glorify the grind, the hustle, the relentless pursuit of more. But the most successful people I know seem to apply the same principle I had to learn in sports. There is no one day that makes or breaks everything. Hero sessions, the ones you post about, are no good if you are not good to go again the next day.

So here's my confession: This newsletter is late because I chose to prioritise sleep over getting up even earlier. It's late because I got caught in a rainstorm on the motorbike and decided to wait 2h in a cafe until it passes. It's late because I decided that feeding my workout addiction should probably come before trying to write anything that is coherent. Because of travel, because of this and that - in short, life tends to get in the way…

I could blame it on a new chapter and figuring things out, but if I'm honest, I was always internally a little chaotic. Luckily, I've learned that chaos and consistency aren't opposites - they are dance partners. The chaos keeps things interesting, the consistency keeps things moving forward.

Maybe that's the real secret: not eliminating the chaos, but learning to be consistently chaotic in a way that serves you. Sometimes that means writing newsletters from Spanish terraces instead of home offices. Sometimes it means trusting that the right moment will arrive, even if it's not the planned moment. As my Dad always told me: if it’s not happy, it’s not the end.

Stay human (and occasionally late),

Jan

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