F*** staying consistent. Blindly doing the same thing over and over again just because some “guru” told you is a tell-tale sign you’ll never have “success.”

I see it all the time. Consistent this, consistent that. That was me. Over and over again. Same thing.

Not learning.

If you’ve slain all your dragons and are marching home then be my guest, but most of us haven’t reached where we want to go.

Real talk, many of us here for one reason or another have a financial goal that drives us. Is your current financial trajectory going to land you where you want to go and when you want to get there?

Quick exercise, you did it in school, let’s try it again. Grab a paper and draw two points on a graph:

1. Where you were a year ago.
2. Where you are now.

Shoot a straight line between them.

Now draw a vertical line for the year you want to reach your goal and a horizontal one for what your goal $ number is. Is the intersection of reality and your dreams the same or are you way off? If it’s off you know continuing what you’ve always done is not going to work. Something has to change.

If you’re like me, you already spend almost every waking hour working on that dream, and working hard. The “trick” is not cold showers, meditation, the gym, or anything other than attacking the actual obstacles in your way. If you’re working long hours, but not seeing a return on it, you may be working on the wrong problem. Consistently doing that will still get you nowhere. My English teacher in high school used to say, “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”

If you’re working long hours, but not seeing a return on it, you may be working on the wrong problem.

I don’t have the answer for what you should be doing, but chances are good that you already do. Take an honest look at what would actually move the numbers on your graph and start doing that. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve got nothing to lose. It wasn’t working out anyways. Embrace learning new things, getting uncomfortable, and iterating on those ideas over and over again.

Don’t get me wrong, I struggle with this myself. I’m in the process of shifting my main side-project from 100% dev work to practicing marketing just as much. I’m now running analytics and watching it every day while I try out different ideas. I don’t have the luxury of eyeballs even.

We all know how a funnel works at a basic level: View > Click > Read > Buy. I was working on the last two parts for months, but views were abysmal. I’m not beating myself up over working on the product, but the best move is obviously to stop and work on the first two.

Alright that’s enough – if you get nothing else from this, seriously consider whether you’re really being consistent in the good sense of the word or being lazy + afraid to change.

Work on what matters.