Probably the one great mental model for self improvement. One of the most difficult to fully grasp. I struggle with it, and only through experience have I gotten better.
Last night I read a great talk by Peter Kaufman on some of the great mental models. He boils them all down to consistency. You can go read that talk here but I’ve put the important parts below.
The most powerful force that could be potentially harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame.
…You want to win a gold medal in the Olympics. You want to learn a musical instrument. You want to learn a foreign language. You want to build Berkshire Hathaway. What’s the formula? Dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame. Look how simple this is. This is above genius. It’s absolutely above genius because you can understand it. This isn’t somebody drawing all these formulas and things up here about, you know, how numbers multiply and amplify over time. The problem that human beings have is we don’t like to be constant. Think of each one of those terms. Dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame. Nobody wants to be constant. We’re the functional equivalent of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountain. You push it up half way, and you go, ‘Aw, I’ll come back and do this another time.’ It goes back down. ‘I’ve got this great idea, I’m going to really work hard on it.’ You push it up half way and,’ Aw, you know I’ll get back to this next month.’ This is the human condition. In geometric terms this is called variance drain. Whenever you interrupt the constant increase above a certain level of threshold you lose compounding, you’re no longer on the log curve. You fall back onto a linear curve or God forbid a step curve down. You have to be constant. How many people do you know that are constant and what they do? I know a couple. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Everybody wants to be rich like Warren Buffett Charlie Munger. I’m telling you how they got rich. They were constant. They were not intermittent.
This week I’m making a better effort to build habits and consistently complete the tasks I have set out in front of me.