Turning Streaky Habits into Steady Progress
Turning Streaky Habits into Steady Progress
Creating a flywheel of pursuits that unifies what's important and drives us to become a bit better each day.
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Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung
Throughout our lives, we chase many pursuits to become better or accomplish something new.
Most of these pursuits are invigorating and all-encompassing when we start, but quickly flame out, becoming forgotten only a few days later.
We begin these pursuits aiming for consistent meaningful progress on what’s most important to us.
Despite our best efforts, we end up with streaky bursts of energy directed at a collection of idealistic yet unrelated objectives, never making meaningful progress on any of them.
Even with the best intentions, our efforts to improve don’t create any changes because our streaks of consistency always come to an end.
Following the trail
The enemies of consistency are linear and scattered thinking.
These mindsets dilute and distract us from making true progress.
We all have many areas of our lives that demand our attention and effort and we typically view each pursuit as a separate project.
With this approach, our effort is spread thin and our focus is narrow.
Each new goal we set, habit we create, or obligation we commit to is like starting to climb a new trail on a mountain.
It’s a huge commitment of time and energy to climb up a mountain, but it’s only worthwhile if we follow through long enough to reach the summit.
Hiking partially up many different trails gives us the illusion that we are busy and making progress, but never allows us to achieve meaningful results.
Creating a flywheel of meaningful progress
Shifting our mindset from many linear pursuits to a cohesive flywheel drives the change needed to focus our energy on the big picture and enjoy meaningful progress.
Instead of separate linear efforts, we can use focused reflection to connect our pursuits and understand how they can work together instead of pulling us in different directions.
Without intentional reflection, we’re prone to chase shiny objects that randomly shift our focus from one pursuit to the next.
When we take the time to pause and reflect on what we want our lives to be like and what pursuits we focus on, we gain perspective on how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
With a better understanding of the bigger picture, we can design our lives so each pursuit fuels the others instead of detracting from them.
The more we refine and align our pursuits the easier it becomes to stay consistent.
Soon enough, the streaky habits are replaced by steady progress in a handful of coordinated worthwhile pursuits.
Prompts
What was the last pursuit where you were initially excited and consistent but quickly flamed out?
Which pursuits in your life today seemingly pull you in different directions? Why?
What is one thing you can change in your approach to these two pursuits to make them work together instead of against each other?
Deep Dive
The Flywheel Effect - Jim Collins
A quick but thought-provoking blog post from the author of Good to Great.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin