The Greatest Skill Of The 21st Century

The greatest skill of the 21st century isn’t:

• Sales

• Video editing

• Lead generation or

• Social media marketing

It’s the skill that’s needed to get results with all of these other skills, it’s the skill that without, you’re doomed to fail.

That skill is consistency.

Now you might be thinking “But consistency isn’t a skill?!” - well, it is.

Consistency is a behaviour that you can get better at with deliberate practice, hence, it’s a skill.

But it’s not just any random skill, it’s a skill that if you don’t build, it doesn’t matter what other skills you try to build, you’ll not get results.

You see, results in anything requires the right knowledge, skill level and understanding.

It takes time to build these 3 areas to the necessary level and with that, it requires compounding to get there - as each bit of knowledge, skill and understanding you build, stacks on top of the knowledge, skill and understanding you already have.

To experience that compounding you need regular and frequent exposure - which is consistency.

It sounds simple, yet so many people struggle to be consistent.

It’s by far one of the biggest questions people ask me - “Ross, how can I be consistent?”

So in this email, I’m going to give you the exact step-by-step breakdown.

It’s what I’ve used to be consistent in posting every single day on Twitter for over 4 years, 6 days a week on Instagram for 2 years and how I’ve hit the gym 5 days a week for 5 years, all without fail.

I do not miss days.

When I decide to do something, I do it and I do it consistently, without fail and here’s how:

 

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The Path Of Gratification

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In order to build consistency, it’s crucial that you have an understanding of the concept of gratification.

There are 2 paths you can follow.

The path of instant gratification - this is the path of least resistance.

This path is great now, it gives you pleasure and makes you feel good, but it sucks later. It makes you feel crap, lazy, unfufilled, and you get 0 results.

An example of this path would be scrolling your phone - you get dopamine now but in 20 minutes you’re going to think “fuck I feel crap now”.

And over a longer time period, all those 20 minutes spent scrolling add up and take away from time doing things that benefit you, and therefore you get 0 results.

The other path is the harder path - the path of delayed gratification.

This path can suck now, but it is great later. It makes you feel good, fulfilled, proud and actually creates results.

An example of this path would be you reading this email.

This email is in-depth and requires a lot of effort to read and then implement, hence you have to do work now, which can be crap, but you’ll get amazing results later, feel fulfilled and be proud of yourself.

In every moment, you have a choice of which path to go down.

Which path you choose will affect which path you give into the next time you’re presented with the choice.

If you give in to instant gratification right now, you’re doing something which you know doesn’t benefit you and isn’t good for you, and hence, what you’re doing is not valuing your actions.

You’re choosing to ignore the potential positive impact your actions could have on your life, because you’re choosing not to do something beneficial.

And because you’re devaluing your actions, you’re not respecting your actions and so you lower your self-respect, making you even more likely to take the easier path the next time you have to make the choice.

Of course, the opposite also applies if you choose delayed gratification.

You’re choosing to do something beneficial, hence you are valuing your actions, hence you’re respecting your actions and increasing your self-respect, making you more likely to choose delayed gratification the next time.

This creates a spiral - either positive or negative, that will dictate the outcomes of your life.

A problem people run into here is this:

You might think, “Oh it’s okay if I give in to instant gratification in my nutrition and eat junk food because I’m still doing the work on my business”.

Well, it’s not.

When you give in to instant gratification in any area, for example, nutrition, you lower your self-respect as a whole, which affects every action you take, hence giving into instant gratification in 1 area of life will leak into every area of your life.

Just like choosing delayed gratification in 1 area will leak into every area of your life.

Right now, you might be choosing delayed gratification in some areas and instant gratification in others, in what’s essentially a battle of priorities, and you might be thinking:

“Which is going to win, which will leak into the other areas first?”

Well, due to the concept of resistance - where we feel resistance to doing hard things - and with the path of instant gratification being the easier path, instant gratification will win.

Resistance will trick you into thinking you don’t need to do the work and because you take the path of instant gratification in other areas, your lower level of self-respect will justify you taking the easy option right now and not doing the work

If you choose instant gratification in 1 area, it will leak into every other area of your life.

However, that won’t happen, if you understand the value of the long game.

Because here’s the thing - fancy tactics and tricks are great, but true change comes from changing your perspective on yourself and the world and that comes from understanding, not tactics and tricks.

So let’s break down the value of the long game.

Often instant gratification only happens because we discount the future.

For example, if I ask you if you want $10 now or $50 next year, you’ll likely choose the $10 now because anything could happen in the next year, and $50 in 1 years time is worth less to you than getting $10 now, because $10 now is certain.

But, if I ask you if you want $10 now or $500 next year, you might choose the $500 next year.

If you do this with a pile of different of people, offering them different amounts of money over different time frames, you can create a discount curve which shows how people devalue the future, how $1 loses it’s value over time to you.

Because really, if you valued the future equally as much as the present, you should always be choosing the $50 next year over the $10 now, because $50 is more than $10, but since we value the present more than the future, everyone chooses the $10.

And some people will still choose the $10 now over $500 in a year, these people don’t value the future that much and are more likely to take the path of instant gratification.

People vary massively on how much they value the future.

So essentially, if you value the future more, you will take the path of delayed gratification and if you value the future less, you will take the path of instant gratification.

Of course, since I’ve harped on at you about how important time and the long game is to building your knowledge, skill and understanding to the point where you can achieve your goal, you should value the future A LOT.

And so you should be willing to take the path of delayed gratification and embrace long-term thinking - because they’re essentially the same thing.

If you take the path of delayed gratification, you’re thinking long-term and valuing the future.

Now that you understand the importance of delaying gratification and doing the things that benefit you, even if they suck now, you can understand that every time you choose to be consistent and do the work you know you need to do, you’re choosing the path of delayed gratification.

Being consistent, is choosing the path of delayed gratification and thinking long term.

Knowing this, and knowing the importance of time and the long game, will help you massively in being consistent.

So, with that background context out of the way, let’s talk about consistency, and to be more specific, let’s talk about how to stick to your goals and not quit.

 

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How To Stick To Your Goals And Not Quit;

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To be consistent in working toward your goals and not, you know, setting a goal, working on it for 2 months and then quitting like most people do, you need to have a goal.

This goal should be meaningful, ie. it adds up to you becoming all you could be, making an impact or living your dream life.

I’m not going to go over how to set goals in this email or we would be here for a week - just set a goal.

Now that you have your goal, we want to be consistent in working toward that goal over the long term.

And to do something, we need to know what it is.

So to be consistent, we need to know what consistency is.

Consistency is you doing a certain thing on a regular and frequent basis, and in this context, it’s you doing a certain thing that moves you toward your goal on a regular and frequent basis.

This means you need a goal, which we covered, but you also need to know what work you need to do to move toward that goal so that you can be consistent in doing that work.

Again, I’m not going to cover that in this email, but figure out what you need to do to achieve your goal.

I touch briefly on my goal-setting concept in this article.

And I go into depth on setting goals and breaking them down inside MasteryOS, click here to check it out.

But either way, it is impossible to be consistent in working toward your goal, if you don’t have a goal or you don’t know what the work you need to do is, so once you have them, we can get into the first real step to being consistent.

 

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Chaos Breeds Chaos

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Harsh truth:

You cannot be consistent in the area that matters if you’re not consistent in every area.

Remember, if you choose the path of instant gratification in 1 area, ie. you choose not to be consistent in 1 area - because being consistent is the harder path and is choosing delayed gratification - then you’re much more likely to choose the path of instant gratification in other areas.

And if you think about what inconsistency is, it’s essentially, doing different things frequently and regularly, which is chaos - there is no order in your decisions.

When you’re consistent, you have order in your life and in your decisions.

When you’re inconsistent, you have chaos - and chaos breeds chaos.

If you’re chaotic in 1 area, you’ll be chaotic in others.

So if you want to be consistent in the area that matters, you need to be consistent in every area of life, because remember, chaos breeds chaos and if you choose instant gratification in 1 area, you’re much more likely to choose instant gratification in others.

But just like chaos breeds chaos, order breeds order and so if you create order by choosing the path of delayed gratification and being consistent in 1 area, that will ripple into other areas of your life.

So there are 3 main ways you can create order and consistency in your life so that you can be consistent in doing the work.

The first is routines.

A routine is a system for your life.

You are streamlining a certain process and part of your life by following the same steps every day, this is consistency and it is order.

What routines you build and how you build them doesn’t matter for the context of this email, just so long as you have them.

The second is plans

With a plan you are purposefully creating order, and if you’re planning your day you’re creating both order and consistency in your days.

Again, it doesn’t matter how you plan your day, just plan it.

The third is through limiting decisions.

There is a reason billionaires wear the same clothes every day.

There is a reason we want to have a plan for our day and have routines for our lives.

Decisions are mentally fatiguing and open the door for chaos.

Seriously - decisions are something we often make quickly and haphazardly, but yet, in the background, in our subconscious, we aren’t taking any decision lightly.

For example, the decisions we make about what to do with our time right now and which path of gratification to take are based on how much we discount or value the future.

So it might seem like most decisions are easy to make, but they’re mentally fatiguing.

Even the likes of what clothes to wear, we are going through all these subconscious decisions of how much we value status, where we’re going, who we’re seeing and all of these things.

So decisions take up a lot of mental energy, and hence, the more we make, the less energy we have and the more fatigued we will be.

The more decisions we make, the worse the outcome is going to be and the more likely that outcome is going to side with chaos rather than order, the more likely that decision will be a decision favouring instant gratification over delayed gratification.

Of course, some decisions cannot be avoided and must be made, hence the door to chaos is always going to be left slightly open, but we want to limit it by limiting the decisions we have to make each day.

With that, the vast majority of decisions we make each day can be avoided and therefore we can limit our mental fatigue from decision making and create order.

Luckily, if you have routines for your day and you have a plan for your day, you’re already removing a tonne of decisions around what you do and when you do it, which is a massive amount of order you’ve created and therefore a massive increase in the likelihood of you being consistent.

But I would also say to limit decisions in other areas as well.

For example, your meals.

I eat the exact same foods every day - eggs, chicken, steak, fruit. Every day. Sometimes I have rice and one meal a week, I’ll eat whatever I want.

So create 3-5 meals that you enjoy, eat a mix of them every day and give yourself 1 meal a week, which is essentially a cheat meal, where you eat whatever you want.

Another area is your clothes.

Wear the same clothes every day.

A pair of blue pair of jeans, navy trousers, black jeans and black trousers. 7 white t-shirts, 2-3 quarter zips, 2-3 white shirts, 2 hoodies, 2 coats and that’s all you need (at least for men, I’m not sure what the staples are in a woman’s wardrobe unfortunately)

So long as you’re not buying childish, bright, fluorescent colours, you’ll be able to easily choose anything from your wardrobe without worrying about what it is and it will look good.

And if you want, have set outfits for each day that you don’t have to think about.

Another area is your workouts.

Don’t just go in and wing your workouts, not only does it create a pile of decisions, but you’re way less likely to make any progress.

Have a program and follow it, this way when you go to the gym, you just follow the program and don’t have to make any decisions.

If you can create order and in turn create consistency in your routines, your daily plan, your meals, your clothes and your workouts, the chances of you being consistent in everything else you do, especially the work for your goals, go through the roof.

I go into detail planning your day, what routines to build and how to build them in MasteryOS, click here to check it out.

PS: The curriculum update coming in June will blow your bloody mind.

Remember, consistency is the path of order and delayed gratification.

So if you choose instant gratification you’re more likely to choose instant gratification again and in other areas of your life.

But if you choose delayed gratification by creating order in your life, you’re much more likely to choose delayed gratification in other areas of your life and be consistent.

 

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Step 2: Controlling Your Inputs.

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Think about what consistency is, it’s doing an action regularly and frequently.

Actions are outputs, and every output has an input.

So if you think of your body as a system, you have inputs, your body then processes those inputs to create an output, which is your actions.

The actions you want to take are obviously positive outputs, hence you need positive inputs to perform them.

Because if you put something bad in, you can’t expect to get something good out.

So if you want to do the actions that move you toward your goal, you need positive inputs, now what those inputs are, we’ll get to in a minute.

But remember, we don’t just want to do the actions once, we want to do them consistently, hence if we want our output to be consistently positive, we need our inputs to be consistently positive.

So if our actions are the output we want to perform, we can largely focus on the inputs to get the output we want.

Now what are these inputs?

Well, your inputs are your goal, your nutrition, your sleep and your environment.

These are all the inputs that you have that affect how your mind and body operate and hence, affect the output you produce.

If they’re bad - if you don’t have a goal, don’t sleep well, don’t eat right or are in a bad environment - your outputs won’t be positive.

In terms of consistency, we want these areas to be consistently good, not just good once in a while, because if they’re only good once in a while, you’ll only get good outputs once in a while.

And we want to be good in all of these inputs, not just in 1 of them or most of them.

Remember, if you choose instant gratification in one area, you’re more likely to choose it in another.

If you view this as a system, with the inputs we mentioned, your body being the process and your actions being the output, there’s also then a feedback loop.

Your actions will feedback into your input.

So if you have bad outputs, ie. bad actions, you’ll have bad feedback, which leads to more bad outputs and the cycle repeats negatively, but if you have good inputs, the outputs will be good and the feedback will be good and the cycle repeats positively.

The other thing you have to understand here is that you’re already consistent.

Consistency is natural for humans.

For example, you already consistently eat food and consistently sleep, what matters is if you’re doing these things consistently well or consistently bad.

Our goal here in this second step is to set everything up so that you can be consistent in doing the right things well and therefore be consistent with the right outputs.

So with that, you need to nail your nutritional input.

Your diet will massively influence your energy levels.

If you have a shit diet, you’ll have shit energy which means you’ll have less energy to take the harder path of doing the right thing, so you’re less likely to do it and you’ll be less consistent.

I would highly recommend like I mentioned earlier to just eat the exact same foods, every day, or at least have a limited selection that you cycle through if you want variety.

I eat steak, chicken, eggs and fruit for basically every meal. I have 1 meal a week where I “cheat” and eat whatever I want.

If you do this, you’ll have consistency in your meals and, therefore consistency in your energy and you’ll have fewer decisions to make.

It’ll also help save your gut microbiome which is incredibly powerful and dictates so much of your mental functions.

Once you are consistent in doing your nutrition well, you’ll find it easier to be consistent in the things you need to do, like the work.

You also need to nail your sleep input.

Sleep dictates how much energy you can have each day, so if you don’t sleep well the amount of energy you can have is limited and therefore your consistency will suffer.

You need to optimise your sleep if you want to be consistent.

Limit blue light exposure, limit caffeine, have a consistent sleep schedule, etc.

I’ll not go into depth on this as this is already a long email.

You then need to nail your goal input.

So yes, your goal is an input and that’s because your goal is a filter.

When you have a goal, you can filter every decision and action through it, simply by asking yourself, “What choice here will move me toward my goal?”

Maybe, you are debating whether to do some work or not.

You can then ask yourself “What choice here will move me toward my goal?”

This will be obvious and then you can make the right choice, which will of course always be on the path of most resistance.

With your goal, you want to set a big enough one so that it forces you to rise to the level necessary of you to achieve it and become the person you need to be.

If you had a big enough and meaningful enough goal, you wouldn’t be inconsistent and you would do all the right things that you need to do, because your goal would force you to be the sort of person you need to be to achieve it.

You will not be consistent until you have this filter to run everything through, until you have the ability to consciously align your actions with where you want to go and until you decide to be consistent not for yourself, but for your goal.

So set a goal and whenever you’re debating what to do or whether you should be consistent or not, ask yourself “What choice here will move me toward my goal?”

You need to optimise your environment.

Your environment is the surroundings you place yourself in and it is one of the biggest inputs determining your outputs.

For example, if you have your phone beside you when you’re working, you will eventually pick it up. If you have TVs in your house, you will eventually watch them. If you have junk food, you will eventually eat it, the same goes for alcohol, smoking and all the rest.

So you want to dictate and control your environment, removing anything from your environment that could tempt you into negative habits and create negative outputs and adding things that will promote the positive outputs that you want to be consistent in.

Your environment is another input that if it’s negative will increase the likelihood you do negative things, creating negative feedback, making you more likely to do more negative things and less likely to do positive things.

But if your environment is positive, you’re more likely to do the things you want to be consistent in doing and that’ll create positive feedback making you even more likely to do positive things and so on.

Look, you could even include people in your environment.

If you hang around with people who are losers and just drink and party and fuck around all day, then you too will do what they do and not be consistent.

I’m not telling you to cut people out of your life or whatever, but I am saying that you should carefully consider who you hang around with because who you hang around with is a massive input that will affect your outputs.

I go into depth on optimising your nutrition, sleep, goals and environment in MasteryOS - click here to check it out.

And that my friend, is how you be consistent.

— Ross

 

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