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!)