Consistently Average

This month marks a year since we packed up our lives in China and moved to Malaysia.

People love anniversaries because they imply neatness. A year feels like something that should come wrapped in reflection, complete with a list of lessons learned and a satisfying before-and-after photograph. We like to imagine that change announces itself with fireworks, that one day we wake up and realise we have become a different person living a different life.

The reality is rather less cinematic.

A year is not made up of milestones. It is made up of Tuesdays.

One morning run in suffocating humidity when every sensible person is still asleep. 

One workshop. 

One school visit. 

One coffee. 

One newsletter. 

One difficult conversation. 

One evening making dinner while trying to remember whether there is clean PE kit for the next morning. 

Repeat often enough and, without really noticing, a year quietly assembles itself.

Looking back, I don't remember most individual days. I remember the repetition.

Perhaps that's why I smiled when I looked back at my vision board from January.

Amongst the usual ambitions and aspirations, I'd written something that, taken out of context, sounds spectacularly uninspiring.

Be consistently average.

Not exactly the sort of thing influencers are printing on tote bags is it?

It wasn't a lowering of ambition. Quite the opposite. It was an acknowledgement that I have spent much of my life mistaking intensity for progress.

I know how to sprint. I know how to throw everything at a project, work ridiculous hours, chase perfection, squeeze one more thing into the day, convince myself that extraordinary effort is the price of extraordinary outcomes.

What I've become less convinced about is whether that's the best way to build a life.

Willpower is wonderful. It gets you out of the starting blocks. It gets you through the first week of a new habit, the first chapter of a book, the first few kilometres of a training plan. It carries you on enthusiasm, novelty and the intoxicating belief that this time will be different.

Then Tuesday arrives.

Novelty disappears.

The weather is awful.

The alarm feels offensive.

Nobody is clapping.

Nobody even knows whether you showed up or not.

That is where almost every meaningful change either survives or dies.

Running has taught me that more than anything else.

People see race day. They see the medal, the finish line photograph, the time on the watch. What they don't see are the dozens of utterly forgettable runs that came before it. The humid mornings. The intervals in the dark and rain. The easy runs that felt painfully ordinary. The kilometres that achieved nothing more glamorous than proving you came back again.

The race was never won on race day. It was won on all the days that looked entirely unremarkable.

Leadership is no different.

We love breakthrough moments. We celebrate inspirational speeches, bold decisions and transformational leaders. Yet if you ask people why they trust someone, the answer is almost never a single extraordinary moment.

Trust is built in the repetition.

The leader who consistently listens.

The colleague who consistently follows through.

The parent who consistently shows up.

Culture is not built in the extraordinary. It is built in the ordinary, repeated often enough that it becomes who we are.

That, I think, is what I was trying to capture with those two slightly awkward words on my vision board.

Consistently average. Not average in aspiration. Average in rhythm.

I wanted fewer dramatic swings. Less all-or-nothing thinking. Fewer weeks fuelled entirely by adrenaline followed by weeks of complete exhaustion. I wanted steadiness. I wanted enough discipline that I no longer had to rely on motivation.

A year later, I don't think I've become particularly exceptional at it, but I have become more consistent. Ironically, that has probably produced more change than any burst of heroic effort ever has and there is something deeply reassuring about that.

It suggests that meaningful change belongs less to the people with the greatest willpower and more to the people who keep returning when no one is watching. 

Perhaps that is all consistency really is.

Not the absence of ambition.

Ambition that has learned to be patient.

A few thoughts to leave you with…

Stop waiting to feel motivated.
Motivation is wonderful, but it has an appalling attendance record.

Reduce the drama.
The biggest threat to consistency isn't failure. It's the belief that every day has to be exceptional.

Measure the repeats, not the highlights.
One extraordinary day changes very little. One hundred ordinary ones change almost everything.

Ask yourself a different question.
Not what do I want to achieve?
But what am I willing to repeat?

In the end, we become far less defined by what we aspire to do than by what we are willing to do again tomorrow.