The other day I stumbled upon Alice Seba’s YouTube channel, and this video captured my attention.

​Consistency Will Overwork You and Keep You from Your Goals​

As someone who has talked about consistency for years, who has said (repeatedly) that consistency trumps brilliance every time, and who often advises clients that the first skill they must build is consistency, I had to watch.

I think you should, too. She makes an important distinction that isn’t clear when we just cling to the consistency mantra.

Rather than striving only for consistency, she says we should instead opt for diligence.

Merriam-Webster defines diligence as “attentive and persistent effort,” while Dictionary.com says, “constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”

Alice’s point is that you can consistently do what seems important, but without the diligence part (the attentive and earnest effort) you can fall into the trap of just doing without really improving.

Take the example of consistently publishing a blog or a podcast. Yes, consistency matters in these areas, but it’s not enough to just show up week after week. Doing that can lead to publishing content for the sake of publishing, and not because you have something valuable to share with an audience who needs to hear from you.

Being diligent means digging deeper, striving for quality over quantity. It doesn’t mean endlessly tweaking, rewriting, or waiting until something feels ‘ready.’ It means paying attention to what’s actually working and improving that.

Here’s the tricky bit, and why I preach consistency to you: It’s impossible to create quality until you’ve achieved quantity.

The story of the photography class, as told by James Clear in Atomic Habits, illustrates this best.

The story goes that a photography teacher divided his class into two groups at the start of the semester. One group was required to turn in a single photo for the semester, and they would be graded on its quality. The other group would be graded only on the total number of photos they turned in.

Can you guess which group produced the best photos? It was the group that took the most photos.

The only way to get better at something, to become a better educator or coach or writer or freelancer, is to do the thing. The more emails you write, the better they will be. The more courses you create, the better teacher you will be.

​Ira Glass says we all have a vision for what we want to create, and we often recognize that what we produce does not meet our own standards. He calls this the creative process, and reminds us that it’s our job to bridge the gap between the vision and the reality.

The only way to bridge the gap, he says, is to make more. That’s consistency.

My advice stands: When you are starting to build a body of work, consistency is the lever you should be pulling. It’s the one thing that will make everything else easier down the road. The more you do, the better, at least for now.

Alice is also correct: When you’ve created enough that you look back at your older work and cringe a little because you can see how much better it could have been, that’s when diligence takes over, and you can focus on improving rather than just doing more.

Don’t get stuck in the consistency trap. Level up to diligence when the time is right.

Cindy “build first, then refine” Bidar

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