#1640 - A Common Mistake When It Comes To Consistency

In our quest for personal growth and success, we often fall prey to the myth that perfection is the prerequisite for progress. However, in today’s episode, Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros shed light on a counterintuitive truth: embracing imperfect action through consistency is the absolute path to mastering any craft and achieving success.

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Show notes:
(1:54) Consistency is not perfection
(5:08) Doing it flexibly
(6:44) The cool part
(9:32) Consistency and quantity
(11:16) Worst day better than the best day
(13:01) Meet like-minded people and jumpstart your journey to achieving your dreams while optimizing your life. Join Next Level Group Coaching. https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/group-coaching/
(14:36) Standard and progress
(16:13) Habits are a way of consistently solving and preventing problems
(19:05) You have to have a minimum
(25:10) Outro

🎙️ Hosted by Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

Next Level University is a top-ranked daily podcast for dream chasers and self-improvement lovers. With over 2,100 episodes, we help you level up in life, love, health, and wealth one day at a time. Subscribe for real, honest, no-fluff growth every single day.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Next level nation. Welcome back to another episode of next level university, where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed yesterday's episode, episode number 1639. What does current, you think, passed you for? Alan and I were very, very tired on that episode. Today, for episode number 1640 a common mistake when it comes to consistency.

Speaker 1 0:29

You and I have noticed this very often when people either start tracking habits or they start focusing on Really habits. I guess it's probably the best example of this where someone will say well, I'm just, I'm just so afraid that I'm not gonna be able to keep up. We hear that very often when it comes to group coaching. I just don't know if I'm gonna be to keep up with everything. I'm afraid I'm not gonna be to keep up with my habits. I'm afraid I'm not gonna be able to show up Perfectly. I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid. And I think the big mistake when it comes to consistency is the assumption that if you are consistent, you must be perfect, when it's quite the opposite If you are consistent, you don't have to be perfect at all because you're doing it more often than other people are doing it.

Speaker 1 1:16

Imagine Good example of this. Imagine you are an artist and every day you draw for 20 minutes. So you draw for 20 minutes Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday 20 minutes. You set a timer, you sit down and you just drop. By the end of the year you have spent whatever it is. Every three you're probably 121 hours, that's my guess, 121.5 hours.

Speaker 2 1:51

Nice work, Holy crap not bad Huh strong work. Yeah, yeah that's super computer up here. You know what I mean. You just did 20 times 365, divided by 60.

Speaker 1 2:02

I did 20 times 3, then that's, then you break that, then you divide that by 365, I think.

Speaker 2 2:10

I don't know how I do it.

Speaker 1 2:12

Certain things they just do 121.6.

Speaker 2 2:15

Pretty good. You said 121.5, so you're wrong. You're 100,.

Speaker 1 2:19

I'm wrong, you have 121.5 hours of practice versus. Imagine if somebody only practiced for one hour a week 52 hours, 52 hours. Imagine if they only practiced for one hour a month. But they did it perfectly. They were so motivated, they were inspired. They had the right setting, the sun was in the right place, they ate the right thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everything was perfect.

Speaker 1 2:46

It doesn't really matter that much, because they just are never going to get the reps in to really really get good at something, to really really make progress. This podcast is a really good example. We've never had a perfect episode, nor will we ever. We never will. There's no such thing. But we have a lot of reps, a lot of reps, a lot of testing, a lot of reflecting, a lot of changing, a lot of trying something new, a lot of reflecting, a lot of doing the same thing, doing different things.

Speaker 1 3:13

That's really the common mistake is you unfortunately think well, if I'm going to be consistent, I need to be perfect, and that's where we get stuck. Well, I don't think I can do it for four hours every day. You don't have to do it for four hours every day. I don't think I can do it. When it's raining out, you don't have to do it when it's raining out. You can do it inside. I don't know if I can do it when I have the kids. You don't have to do it the same way. You do it without the kids. When you do have the kids, you can do it in a completely different way. It's not about doing it perfectly, it's not about doing it optimally. It's about doing it, and doing it looks different.

Speaker 1 3:53

I think that's another thing that's important about consistency is consistency and, I think, flexibility. If you're somebody who's really flexible, it might not be that hard for you to be consistent. I don't mean physically flexible, I mean organizationally flexible, maybe Mentally. Mentally yeah, your personality, that's one of your intangibles, that's one of your attributes. Amy's a really good example For Amy on the team.

Speaker 1 4:19

Her exercise is anything that involves moving her body. It doesn't have to be weight training. It was yoga for a long time. I'm sure it's walk sometimes. Maybe it's ice skating when there's ice, because if it was well, I need to do 45 minutes of weight training every single day in order to give myself credit for it. I don't think I can do that. Therefore, you never start. Therefore, you never get consistent at it. Therefore, you never see the results. If you are the type of person who says, well, I just can't do that consistently because the barrier to entry is too high. Remember, if you're doing it consistency, you're digging a deeper hole anyway because you're doing it enough times. That is my goal and tension with this episode.

Speaker 2 5:04

One of my favorite books ever of all time is Atomic Habits by James Clear. There's a chapter where they talk about a study that was done with photographers. There was a photography class I've talked about this before where they split the class in half. There was the quantity group and there was the quality group. The idea is that the quality group would go out and take the perfect picture. They would come back with one perfect image with the perfect background, with the perfect lighting, at the perfect time of day, with the perfect editing, and it would be the best photo ever of all time. And they competed with the quantity group. The quantity group was told take as many pictures as you can, fail forward, just go go breaks mags. And then at the end and I forget the exact parameters, I think they had a day or something, I don't know, but at the end they compared the best of the 100 photos to the and again, I don't know if it's 100 or 1000, I really don't know the logistics but I do know that they compared the quantity group with the quality group and the quantity group, the best photo out of the 100, was way better than the one, the one good photo. And so the analogy here is if you can be consistent. The cool part is you kind of don't have to be that great because you become great through consistency. So, for example, I'm not that strong of a writer.

Speaker 2 6:37

Naturally, writing and reading never came super easy to me Math and science always did. But I've been sharing my blog with a lot of people lately and it's actually been getting some really good traction on LinkedIn, which is really cool. But I read some of my writing and it's whoa, especially in comparison to the old days. So I started the next level audio blog and I started with episode one, which was blog number one, and now I'm on blog number 15. Again, quantity versus quality, and I'm reading the audio blog of the first blog that I did and it's very hard for me to go back because I'm already so much better.

Speaker 2 7:17

But here's the thing I'm only writing 20 minutes a day. Earlier today I actually counted, I count editing. So my latest blog, blog number 15, I write, I publish, I edit Jerry and then edits and then I republish. I'm still editing number 15, even though it's available right now, it's public published and I set the timer for 20 minutes this morning and I edited it. I'm just going through and improving it. It's all I'm doing and that counts. Now my writing has gotten so much better, and so, whether it's the photographers in James Clear's book, that Study, or it's me writing 20 minutes a day, the cool part about consistency is that over time you just get ahead. It's the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise always eventually wins. You just, you do. You just get better and better and better, and better.

Speaker 2 8:08

And so, kevin and I, we obviously believe in consistency when it comes to podcasting, and we go on these other shows, and it's been really cool to realize that the consistency pays off so much because other people quite frankly, some of them have put more effort into their one episode a week than we do each episode. Now, what I mean by that isn't that we don't have a great production team and we don't have great production value. We do 100%. What I mean is some of them spend a lot of time making sure every word and every episode is edited perfectly. We don't do a ton of editing on our show. There's a little bit, but not much.

Speaker 2 8:49

My point is, though, is that if you took one of our worst episodes this week and compared it to a new podcaster and their best episode, even if they put 10 hours into editing, that ours would be better. The reason why is because of the quantity. It's the consistency in the quantity, those little iterative improvements each time. Even though Kev said we've been messing up for 1600 episodes, there's always some sort of a mess up on each episode. Over time, it just gets so good. It's like someone who's been playing basketball for 20 years you just get really really, really good. And again, we've only been podcasting for seven years, but the amount of reps that we've put into those seven years matters, and whether it's exercise or podcasting or whatever it is, I noticed that consistency is the superpower that everyone undervalues because it's just so boring, it's just so boring and there's no way around that. It's just really boring.

Speaker 1 9:54

You were a gamer. Now it's a very weird time. So when I say gamer, this is somebody who streams and plays games PlayStation, whatever, computer games, whatever it is competitively and makes money doing it. There are some gamers that I like. They're funny, they have good personalities. I like them. They stream, slash, play games for anywhere from six to eight hours a day. That's all they do, but imagine the amount. So when I play let's say I play once a month I suck. I'm not very good. I'm not very good. There's no way I'm ever going to be as good as them, because I'm not ever going to put that level of time in. Imagine six hours a day of playing video games. Imagine how much you're going to know your worst day is going to be better than my best day.

Speaker 2 10:46

Literally, that's exactly every time, every time, every time You're going to know things I don't.

Speaker 1 10:51

You're going to know. You're going to know everything that I don't. Well, this weapon does this and this part of the map is this. And oh, there's a cheat code here and here's this. I'm not going to know any of that because I don't have as much time in. I just don't have as much time in, but they have games that suck, that are. This is kind of it.

Speaker 1 11:14

It's almost like you can't be afraid to do something below your standard, because you doing it below your standard for long enough raises your standard and it raises your competence. You might always do it below your standard, depending on how high your standards are, but eventually it gets to the point where your standards are so much higher than everybody else's that your bad day is not a bad day for everyone else. If you're an interior designer, if you're a chef, whatever you're a dog walker, whatever it is, whatever your dream is, whatever the dream that you're chasing is, if you do it more than anyone else, you're going to know more than anyone else and you're going to have better results than anybody else doing that, and an easy day for you is going to be very, very impressive to other people because you have so many reps in. So next time you feel like you want to do something perfect, I would. I think one of the things that's helped me over, because that's something I wanted to do. I wanted to do something perfect in the beginning. I wanted the perfect episode. I wanted the perfect interview. I spent hours researching guests before we had them on and they went well.

Speaker 1 12:24

But I don't know if I ever really lived up to my standard. Even on this episode. I won't live up to my standard. My standard's high. I have a very high standard. I'm okay with it. I don't lose sleep over it, but I always know I could have done this better. I could have done that better. When I review the show, I literally there's times where I'll be listening to myself talk and I'll say I hope I say this next. Sometimes I do, other times I don't and I say that would have been a better place or what was that? Was I even listening to what Alan was saying? That always happens. Oftentimes I'm below my standard, but my standard is so much higher than it used to be.

Speaker 1 13:03

That's the beauty of consistency your standard goes up. It starts as 20 minutes of yoga where 10 minutes in, you're lying on the floor and you're done, and then it's 20 minutes of yoga and you get 11 minutes of active yoga, and then it's 12 minutes, 13, 14. And eventually you get 20. And then after that, every minute you're able to do something a little bit better, and then later it's every minute you're able to do it, and then eventually it's 30 minutes maybe, and then the same thing happens for the first 20,. You're good, and then you get tired at 21. And then eventually it's 22. That's the beauty of it. It's not about perfection, it's about progress, and progress is going to come through consistency. There is no such thing as perfection. It'll never exist. I don't think it's empowering to want it, because it's going to, unfortunately, potentially hold you back. Progress, progress is the way, progress is everything.

Speaker 2 13:55

Yeah, perfection is irrational, not good, holds you back, detrimental to your self worth, detrimental to your self esteem. Progress is really important. Last piece of this consistency. If you can master that one word in a given area, you kind of don't have to worry about that thing that much. That's. My favorite part of consistency is, when I'm doing so, mobility. It took me 2023, I didn't do well. My mobility I haven't missed yet in 2024. And I don't intend on it. The cool part is I just feel flexible all the time. It's almost like it's taken care of now.

Speaker 2 14:33

Habits are a way of consistently solving problems. So, for example, if you want to be in shape, really think about this. If you really could and I know it's easier, it sounds easy, everything sounds easy If you could exercise consistently and diet consistently, you would just end up in shape. You would just be pretty much in shape like all the time. Now are you going to be a professional bodybuilder or Olympic athlete? No, not necessarily. Right, that's when you really have to dial up some other stuff.

Speaker 2 15:05

But if you really wanted to be in better shape than all of your peers and you wanted to take off your shirt at the beach or be in a bikini and feel good about it. You could consistently exercise and consistently diet and you would be in better shape than 90% of people. But you'd have to be consistent. You'd have to do it very, very, very consistently. And so I joke with Kev. I've been very consistent in exercise of Emile and I surpassed two years every day recently. But I told Kev I he's we playfully joke of like you think you'd be in better shape, but the truth is I just decided not to diet. I just exercise really consistently, and part of the reason why is because now I don't have to diet, now I have to if I really want to hit another level. But I'm in like pretty good shape without having to do much else just because I hit that one pillar every day you can kind of get away with it.

Speaker 2 16:02

You want to. You want a new reason to be consistent. You get to get away with eating what you want. I kind of can eat reasonably what I want, because I'm just burning so many calories when I just exercise super, super consistently. They add up. Let's say I burn 250 calories every half hour a day. It's probably a little more than that, and some days it's probably 500. Some days it's probably 200, but it's day after day after day after day. It never misses. So think about how much more I can eat than most people. And then on top of that I'm building muscle mass. So now I burn more calories. My metabolism is revved because I'm eating more. Now I'm burning even more. You just get the compound effect. I can feel it. I can feel it. It's, it's nice, you don't have to concern yourself. It's not like, oh, it's like one less thing to worry about. It's like, okay, exercise is taken care of.

Speaker 2 16:52

Now some workouts suck. I talked about being sick on the elliptical and that's bringing the point of the episode, which is you have to have a minimum that you that checks the box. I did the elliptical and that counted. If Emilia and I play soccer this summer, it counts. We play basketball for 30 minutes, it counts. You know it has to be moving your body, but everything that's moving your body consistently for 30 minutes counts. Walking Tucker counts, and if it didn't, there's no way.

Speaker 2 17:22

I could ever be consistent for two years? No way. And so make the game winnable. It's your game, it's your habit, it's your thing. Make it winnable so that you get the self-esteem from check check. We all have had Snapchat streaks before, or Fitbit streaks, or whatever it is 10,000 step streaks. You, when you start the streak, you just don't. You'll do anything to keep the streak. It's such a cheat code I just I'm not going to not exercise because I get to say I've done it for two years straight. What are the chances I'm going to miss tonight? There's just no way. Well then you got to start a new streak.

Speaker 1 18:00

And then you got to start a new streak.

Speaker 2 18:01

There's so much pain associated with starting a new streak and so just start small. We started with four months. I said four months, I want to do four months, I want to beat my old best four months. And then we got to a year and I was like, okay, now what? And he was like, let's do this forever. And I was like, um, and that was a moment for me of like, do you? I?

Speaker 1 18:22

mean.

Speaker 2 18:22

I know you're serious, but do I even want to do that? And then here we are, two years. So you just kind of start small and let it build and eventually you build up a streak and then the only focus is don't break the streak. Don't break the streak. We went up to 35 minutes a day and then I told Emilia we got to can't we got to go back down to 30.

Speaker 2 18:44

I need a minimum of 30. Sometimes we can do 35. I know at one point I was doing 45 minute workouts every other day, weight training, and I just could not sustain it with everything else going on. So there's a way to be consistent without being perfect. There is, and a lot of the team is doing fitness streaks right now. So that's proof of it. It's not just me, it's not just Kev.

Speaker 1 19:04

There's ways to be consistent.

Speaker 2 19:05

I know you're not with a fitness streak, but you streak for your boy, but you've had tons of streaks on other stuff, yeah, yeah, right, and so I think you got to pick the things that you want to have a streak on and it'll build yourself respect so much, it'll build yourself esteem so much. And, yeah, sometimes it'll be really hard, but it's better than feeling down and out like you can't. You can't Keep the promises you make to yourself.

Speaker 1 19:27

Consistency is not just solving problems in advance. It's preventing certain problems from ever existing. That's really last example, and if you're a dream chaser who's focused on being an entrepreneur in some way shape or form, this might resonate and this might be valuable. Many of my clients, the reason they're not making any money with their business is because they haven't done the right things consistently. The reason it doesn't happen right away when they start working with me or maybe any coach, Alan, you're able to get results very, very quickly, but the reason is it takes time to build that consistency. If you haven't messaged a potential client in three years, you're not gonna message one and get a client today. Most likely it isn't gonna happen. But if you were messaging clients for the last three years, you may never have to worry about it again. It's just what you do I message, I spend 20 minutes talking to people a day and I don't know I just get clients. No, no, it's not. I don't know. That's how you do it. That's exactly how you do it, when on the other end, there's people saying I don't know why I don't get clients. That's why. That's the reason. So I just wanted to add that Next level nation, One of the biggest things holding us back from success is the people we surround ourselves with, unfortunately, or it's one of the biggest things that helps us achieve success. It wouldn't be where I am without Alan and the amazing team we have and all the mentors we've had and Taren and all that the coaches we've had, Alan, the same Alan has wonderful people in his life as well, Many of the same as I have the pleasure of having.

Speaker 1 21:02

If you're looking for more positive people and you just can't figure out where they are, maybe you join next level nation and you haven't had the courage to send somebody a message yet. Next level live 2024 is going to have a bunch of positive people. Imagine being in a room where you're not the weird one for liking self-improvement. You're not the weird one for listening to stuff about how to work through your ego or whatever it is, limiting beliefs, all of that. Any room that you're in that's hosted by us, you're not going to be the weird one, and next level live is no exception. We are doing in person as well as virtual. We would absolutely love to have you there. It's a great opportunity to get outside of your comfort zone if you're scared, but it's also a great opportunity to meet people. There's going to be no shortage of growth minded people there. Link will be in the show.

Speaker 2 21:50

Imagine a world where self-improvement, personal growth, personal development, self-awareness, all of these things. Imagine a world where those things are cool. That's what we want NLU to be when it's cool, it's supported, it's respected, it's admired, it's awesome. So join next level nation and or next level live. Get around more next level people, and I want to give a shout out to all the people that have been engaging in next level nation, kev. There's been some good comments coming through. There's also been a lot of posts. People have been having the courage to post. So, if you're listening to this show, have the courage to shout yourself out. Post something that is courageous and it's going to get a lot of love. If it's humble and grateful and growth minded, it's going to get a lot of love, and so have the courage. We would love to connect with you, and Kevin and I will give it some love as well, definitely.

Speaker 1 22:44

Tomorrow, for episode number 1,641, a simple question. A simple, powerful, potentially triggering question. A potentially triggering episode Do you love yourself? I'm very intrigued to do this episode because I don't think we've done one like that in a minute. So that's what we're going to do tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you and NLU. We do it out of fans. We have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Speaker 2 23:13

Stay consistent. Next up on Nation.

Speaker 1 23:18

Nice Strong work. See you strong.