I only started driving in 2017.

In those early days, I remember being crippled with anxiety whenever there were more than two vehicles on the road.

Back then, crawling at 30 miles per hour was very fast.

However, for me, the holy grail of driving was the ability to drive with one hand. You see, I always held the steering wheel with both hands and my brain would always fry whenever someone tried to hold a conversation with me as I drove.

In contrast, I saw other people flawlessly executing what I was incapable of doing.

As I saw other drivers use one hand to control a 4000-pound vehicle as they nonchalantly engaged in conversations with passengers, I could not help but grow green with envy every single time.

The question that never seemed to leave my mind was this: How are these guys able to drive a car with just one hand?

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, my boss and I traveled for a conference.

In the car, we talked about the finer details of the presentation we were scheduled to deliver together the following day.

Of course, I was the cool driver cruising along the highway — with just one hand on the steering wheel!

That’s when it occurred to me that I had been doing this bad habit for almost two years and I did not even know it!

If you think I am advocating for one-handed driving, you are missing my point.

The bigger picture is the process that took me from the ‘Day Crawler’ in 2017 to the ‘Cool Cruiser’ a couple of years later.

Now that I think about it, the one thing that transformed me from one state to the other is so obvious.

Consistency!

I became a better, more confident driver because I continued to drive every day and in every circumstance.

I drove in the rain.

I drove in the snow.

I drove at night.

I drove in the fog.

The more I drove, and the more contexts I drove in, the better I became as a driver.

Consistency made me a better driver!

At the end of every year, people give different motivational talks about how you need to keep reinventing yourself every year.

They talk about how it is essential for you to make plans for the new year to be your best year yet.

However, while I am all for planning and reinvention, I don’t know why people wait till the end of the year before they make such moves.

It’s not like your life stops and resets at the end of every year.

The earth does not stop revolving around the sun to give everyone a breather at the end of each year.

Yet, we are quick to hop on the bandwagon of those who conveniently advocate for reinventing yourself every year — forgetting the rewards that may arise from persisting with your current path.

If you really want to be successful in any field of endeavor, you need to reflect on previous successes you’ve experienced in your life.

If none comes to your mind, think about the following:

You did not learn to walk because you planned it. Rather, you learned to walk because you were consistent.

You did not learn to write alphabets because you reinvented yourself, you learned because you were consistent.

If you’ve earned a degree, it happened because your study habits were consistent over the duration of your schooling.

Consider this quote I have been meditating on for some days now,

He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread; but he that followeth after vain persons is void of understanding

– King Solomon (Proverbs 12:11)

Every step of the farming process is a testament to the power of consistency.

A half-hearted attempt to clear the weeds on a farm will make it impossible to plant seeds.

A half-hearted attempt to plant seeds will jeopardize the farmer’s harvest when it is time.

Even harvesting is dependent on consistency. The farmer does not harvest half-way before trying to reinvent himself into a shepherd. Rather, when the crops are ripe, he goes all in and does not relent until he’s done.

On the other hand, there are the inconsistent ones who are tossed to and fro by the different doctrines pushed by the different thought leaders.

People in this camp are left overwhelmed with information, even as they sink into the cesspool of action paralysis…until the end of the following year when they get their next fix of reinvention talk.

If you are ready to thrive, you do not need to wait till the end of the year to make your desired change happen.

All you need is consistency, and here are 3 tips that will keep you on track.

1. Eliminate Ruthlessly

As humans, we are finite.

We can only be in one place at a time.

We only have enough resources for some things, but not everything.

As a result, we need to deliberately select what we choose to focus our attention on.

Again, when you think about the previous successes you’ve experienced in your life and you’d find them rife with elimination.

To walk, you needed to eliminate crawling.

To write, you needed to eliminate the uncoordinated hand movements that were not giving you the desired symbols.

Staying consistent becomes a simple ordeal when you ruthlessly eliminate the unessential and concentrate on what matters.

2. Design an Enabling Environment

When the defaults in your environment promote the performance of your desired behavior, you become more consistent at it.

For instance, if you want to be more productive with your time, you could redesign your physical space such that your phone is in a separate room whenever you need to work.

In the same way, if you want to be a generally more healthy individual, it is easy to build consistency in healthy eating when your immediate environment is filled with healthy meals.

Your environment is not just limited to the physical inanimate objects in your surroundings. Rather, it also comprises of your social environment, which is made up of the people you surround yourself with.

Before I started driving, no one in my immediate circle could move a car to save their lives. I naturally started driving as soon as my social environment comprised of drivers.

Think about it: You are able to walk today because the people who surrounded you as a child all walked and encouraged you to walk.

Like I said in my post, The Adullam Ring: Outsourcing Decision-Making for Better Outcomes, when you form your Adullam Ring of like-minded individuals, you set yourself for success in the long-run. This happens because of the positive peer pressure that constrains you towards consistency. No one wants to be the one dragging the group back.

3. Track Your Progress

When you are in the habit of measuring how often to repeat a desired behavior, you are more likely to stick with it.

As you track each time you write that article, meditate, go to the gym, make that sales pitch, or do some predetermined action outside your comfort zone, you will literally see those tiny actions add up over time in your tracker.

Self-sourced motivation is the best kind of motivation, and there are very few things that can spark motivation than seeing yourself going on a streak.

I have provided a simple habit tracker that you can download and adapt for the purpose of tracking your habit (No squeeze page or sign up!)

What would you do if you were distressed, discontented with your lot in life, and in debt?

To get to that point, you’d probably acted irrationally by ignoring sunk costs to keep dumping precious resources on projects that are doomed to fail.

You might have also failed to keep opportunity costs at the forefront of your mind, and as a result, you now find yourself regretting and imagining what might have been.

Perhaps, you’re now in debt because you have esteemed immediate gratification more than future rewards. Now you’re down and out.

You know poor decision-making habits got you to where you are.

Now’s the time to summon all your willpower and pull yourself out of the situation, because the only person to blame is you. Right?

Wrong. You’re Making the Fundamental Attribution Error

As humans, we are often guilty of grossly overplaying the power that our personalities have on many aspects of our lives.

Yet, when you think about it, you’d realize that in your day-to-day activities, your environment is arguably at least as important as your personality.

Your environment influences the kind of options you have for food. For instance, yams do not grow in the United States, and as a consequence, they do not eat pounded yam. Similarly, apples do not grow in Nigeria, making it impossible to eat apple pies over there.

The environment also plays a key role in the type of clothes you will wear, which will, in turn, affect your appearance. Take a moment and ponder on this: No matter how fanatic an individual is as a Christian, she will still put on a shawl if she happens to be in the deserts of the Middle East. Failure to do so will make her vulnerable to the dusty winds of that region.

When you reduce what one eats or wears to the barest concept, you’d find them for what they really are.

They are decisions that you make without actively thinking.

Why? Because the environment you are situated in determines the range of your choices.

My point is simple: If the environment can influence our decisions in the form of the food we eat, or the clothes we wear, why do we fail to see its impact on other aspects of our decision making?

It’s because we are all guilty of committing the Fundamental Attribution Error.

According to researchers, the fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate environmental factors and overestimate the role of personality in determining all forms of behavior – including quality decision making.

And you see the result in our societies today:

People identify as depressed individuals, while totally ignoring the fact that they might be in a depressing physical or social environment.

There are discontented individuals and families all over the world who are neck-deep in debt but fail to see how the prevalent culture of materialism and immediate gratification has made them vulnerable to buying unnecessary things.

Your personality may affect the quality of your decisions, but your environment is the real game-changer. It will make or break you.

Reciprocal Determinism and Your Adullam Ring

Some might read all these and conclude that I’m advocating a total lack of personal responsibility since we are in an unwinnable war against the environment.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

God, in His infinite power and wisdom, knows how powerful the environment can be in influencing our decisions, habits, and behavior. And what’s more? He has given us the ability to deliberately design our environment in such a way that it would influence the quality of our decisions.

Somewhere along the line, as David’s embarked on his journey of destiny towards Israel kingship, he punctuated his trip with a retreat in a cave at a place called Adullam.

While there, certain men sought to associate themselves with the future king.

Their resume wasn’t stellar in any shape or form.

These men were in distress.

They were discontent with their lots in life.

They were in debt.

These men were in a terrible place in their lives, likely due to the quality of their individual choices up until that point.

But when you fast-forward a few years, the narrative had changed.

These men were no longer referred to as the distressed, the discontented, or the debtors. Rather, they were called David’s Mighty Men.

Bold. Strong. Valiant.

Imagine being trapped in a pit.

On a snowy day.

With a lion.

And still escaping victorious!

That’s just one tale from the remarkable accomplishments of these men.

But there is every chance that these stories would have been lost to posterity if these men had not made the initial decision to change their environments to Adullam.

These men formed their Adullam Ring with David and the sky became the beginning.

Let’s apply this concept to the quality of your decisions.

Do you really think you will be out of shape if the five closest people in your circle are fitness junkies?

Do you think it will be possible for you to continue drowning in debt because of an extravagant lifestyle if your Adullam Ring comprised of individuals who are masters at living within their means?

When your network is made up of people who value delayed gratification over instant fixes of dopamine, you will find yourself doing the same in a matter of time.

Sheer willpower and grit can take you far, but if you want to see the quality of your decision making multiplied ten-fold, you must design your social environment through an Adullam Ring.

The Simplest Way to Form Your Adullam Ring

Sometimes, I write an epic post that people deem as valuable and the next thing I know, I get a message from someone asking me to be their mentor.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

If you take this approach, it is very likely that you will not get a favorable response. Why? For those who truly understand, a true mentor-mentee relationship is an involved process that consumes the time, effort and resources of both parties for the desired results to be achieved. It’s not something done impulsively.

On the other hand, the Adullam Ring method will give you more traction in a faster period. Here’s how:

First, examine your current circle and identify people who have similar goals as you do. If you are finding it difficult to identify like-minded individuals, there is a good chance that your network needs to be broadened. You can do this by looking out for programs where you know you have a good chance of meeting like minds. Note that you do not need to look for gurus or top professionals for this purpose. All you need are 2 – 5 people who are headed in the same general direction as you are, and are either at your level of proficiency or a step or two ahead of you.

Next, reach out to these individuals and tell them what you are trying to achieve and how you feel you all could be a source of encouragement to each other. It is important to frame the request as a mutually beneficial relationship. Remember, this is not a mentorship, rather a platform for being a part of someone’s enabling social environment, even as they are part of your Adullam Ring.

Finally, have an accountability plan. Naturally, there are certain behaviors that are easier to get accountability than others. For instance, if your goal is to improve your fitness, a simple accountability system is simply to head into the gym at the same time with the group. Of course, if you want to save money, your accountability system will be slightly different. The goal of accountability is to promote what I consider the secret sauce for developing the habit of making quality decisions in the long-run. By incorporating accountability in your Adullam Ring, the decision-making power no longer lies with you, but the larger group. As a result, your decisions become outsourced to your environment, and you reap your desired outcomes.

In Conclusion…

The quality of your decision-making is often a reflection of where you choose to make your habitat. You already outsource the bulk of your decision-making to your environment. Why not take the next step and deliberately design your an enabling and empowering Adullam Ring that will improve your decision making, bring you closer to your desired results.

A life that is plagued with poor decisions is like a watch with dead batteries – the times are more awry than it needs to be.

If you are serious about improving the quality of your life, you need to be more conscious of one simple thing that everyone overlooks 90% of the time.

You wanna know what it is?

It’s Opportunity Costs.

So, what are Opportunity Costs? This is best explained with an example.

Suppose you have the option of choosing between vegetables and chocolate. If you opt for the chocolate, your opportunity cost is not just the vegetables, but the flat tummy and healthier body you’ve always wanted.

The same thing happens when you have to choose between scrolling mindlessly on Instagram and taking action on the online program you just purchased. As before, if you choose Instagram, your opportunity cost is not just the time you would have spent on the online course, but also the rewards the specialized knowledge could have brought you in the future.

As you can see, in spite of our best intentions, as humans, we find a way to not act in our best interests. As a result, the quality of our lives continues to plummet.

But it is not all tales of doom.

You can improve the quality of your life, and one way to do that is to be more conscious of opportunity costs when you make decisions.

So, how then can you be more conscious about opportunity costs to improve your decision making?

Be Ruthless in Your Planning to See Opportunity Costs Better

Stephen Spiller, associate professor at the University of Califonia, Los Angeles, conducted a study to examine how sensitive people were to opportunity costs in their decision making. In his study of 242 people, Spiller discovered that respondents who planned how they spent their income were more likely to consider opportunity costs than their counterparts who did not plan.

What’s the point here?

If you want to improve your consciousness to opportunity costs, you need to plan ahead of time when you’re not under any pressure to choose! While this obviously applies to money, you can see the same effect in various aspects of life. For instance, when you plan your day ahead of time, you’re less likely to ‘waste’ time on activities and choices that can derail you from your desirable destination

Impose Constraints on Yourself Simplify Opportunity Costs

In the same study, Spiller discovered something interesting.

Among the respondents that did not plan, those whose salaries came in every month thought more about opportunity costs than those who got their wages every week.

This means that, even though the monthly salary earners did not want to think about it, the conditions of their pay still constrained them to think about opportunity costs. Naturally, the results would be quadrupled if planning was involved, but this is much better than nothing!

So, how can you set up constraints? A good example is leveraging on technology.

I’ll explain with a personal example.

Some months ago, I noticed that I spent a lot of time mindlessly surfing the internet. To help constrain my tendencies, I installed an app on my phone that blocked me from accessing my favorite sites for a large chunk of the day.

The result? My productivity skyrocketed because I constrained myself from having to choose between mindless surfing and projects I had on my desk!

Change the Frames and Opportunity Costs Become Clearer

Many times, we fail to consider opportunity costs because of the way the options are framed (i.e., presented to us).

Some researchers conducted a study where they offered a group of students the opportunity to by a DVD.

For some of the participants, the researchers presented the opportunity as a choice between buying the DVD and not buying it. Other participants received the opportunity as a choice between buying the DVD and ‘keeping the money for other purchases’.

Needless to say, the first group made 20% more DVD purchases than the second group.

This goes to say that the way the options are presented to you will determine how easily you will consider opportunity costs.

If you want to improve decision making, you need to learn how to deliberately change the frame.

So, when everyone is seeing the sale as “just 40% off”, you are changing the frame and realizing that you’re still paying 60%!

In the same vein, when everyone else is seeing the extra work as an opportunity to make extra money and advance your career, you’re changing the frame to see it as a means by which you lose valuable time with your significant other.

In Conclusion…

Just as it’s never too late to change dead batteries out of a clock, you can dramatically improve the quality of your life by improving the quality of your decisions.

All you need to do is to be more sensitive to opportunity costs by planning ruthlessly, imposing constraints on yourself, and actively changing frames presented to you.