I measure my days, weeks, and years by what I’ve accomplished.
I ask myself, “What happened? What did I do? What was the end result? The outcome?” My satisfaction with time well spent is based on what I accomplished during that time.
Think: 52 books in 52 weeks, hitting a PR at the gym, 100 writing prompts in 100 days, etc.
I find these types of resolutions motivating — an indication of forward momentum. But this year, I’m catching myself looking back more than looking forward. I’ve come to realize that even though creating resolutions is about the future, achieving them is all about the past. It’s about consistency, and this lesson permeated my life last year.
It started in April when I was introduced to the haenyeo, an all-female Korean diving collective in the novel The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See. There is love and loyalty, but also fear and betrayal as this book is set against the background of Japanese Colonialism and war. In the aftermath, some members of the community try to leave the past in the past. This leads to — in my opinion — the greatest line in the book when one of the haenyeo women vehemently disagrees with the others, stating:
“The past is the present. The present is the future.”
Meaning, our present circumstances are a product of our past actions in the same way that our future circumstances are a product of today’s actions. It's easy to look at the past as separate from the present or the future — as if past, present, and future are three individual entities. In reality, they are all one.
And somehow, this makes 2022’s goals feel attainable.
Focusing on the Process
If resolutions are nothing more than goals, the objective is success. Right?
Success is subjective. It can mean money or happiness or fame. Pick your poison. But the bare-bones definition of success is to achieve a goal. To set your eyes on something, and then go out and get it.
In this case, who better to turn to than a performance coach?
I started following Justin Su’a after he spoke at a work event on resilience back in 2020. He’s the Head of Mental Performance for the Tampa Bay Rays. Random, I know. Just go with it.
His job is to coach players to success. Interestingly, Su’a places greater emphasis on the process than the product. He advises that “if you want to improve the quality of your results, start by examining the quality of your process.”
What this statement implies is that the end result — any end result — is cumulative. The output is a result of consistent input. This advice sounds simple. Intuitive, even. But I rarely think in this way. Instead, I’m prone to expecting success in my first attempt, ignoring the prerequisite of daily effort.
Story time…
2 months ago I sat down to write my first screenplay. I’ll just write a short film, I thought. No research, no due diligence. Just an idea.
Fast forward one hour, I’m crying myself to sleep (not kidding) after watching shorts that have won awards at film festivals like Sundance and Cannes, thinking that’ll never be me.
How ridiculous.
In a society that applauds success, with little mention of the road to get there or the failure involved, this type of comparison is too easy. But is that going to stop me from making the comparison anyways? Absolutely not.
What I’ve come to learn in the past year is that the key to success is simply consistency. It’s a boring truth that had to hit me over the head time and time again throughout 2021 for me to understand and accept it. The synchronicity I’ve experienced has felt like the universe was scheming to teach me this lesson at every opportunity:
Internalizing Consistency
Intellectualizing the idea of consistency was easy enough, but I didn’t internalize it immediately. I understood consistency as a theme, but wasn’t able to adopt it as a value until I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino a few months after The Island of Sea Women.
In this book, an explorer details various fictional cities that he comes across, one of which is Zaira:
“A description of Zaira today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
When I read this passage, I immediately thought of the haenyeo women. Both books highlighted the idea that no one or no thing simply comes to be without a carefully conspiring chain of events and concerted, sustained effort.
Neither Zaira nor the legacy of the haenyeo women simply “happened”. Award winning films or books or companies don’t simply “happen”. They are derivatives of consistency. Of energy expended every day for a long time.
Impressive as they might appear in their final state, we would be fools to believe that such accomplishments could be possible without deliberate, gradual days that begrudgingly built towards the present day, against all odds. Everything that we do and everything that we are is a function of the things we have done and the versions of ourselves we have been.
Showing Up
Consistency can be isolating. It's the unseen and unsexy part of producing great work. When we’re in the moment, pen-in-hand, it's easy to feel like we're the only person on the planet taking life so seriously. In October I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, where he recounts his time living in the woods at Walden Pond, actively choosing isolation to limit distractions. This allows him to live each day with extreme intention:
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity...To affect the quality of the day — that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”
Thoreau’s sentiments made me think about my screenplay fiasco and the reason that first attempts feel so difficult. There is no repetition, former iterations, or “past” to rely on. No muscle memory to inform my next move.
With this final gift of literary synchronicity, I came to deeply appreciate consistency as a personal value. When I strip away the sparkle of accomplishment, I recognize that the beauty is not in the final product. The beauty lies in all the days leading up to the final product.
And if every action we’ve ever taken amounts to right now — then our job is just to show up. And show up regularly. Not to be perfect, but just to be consistent.
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How does this lesson show up in my life now? While I may not have a screenplay written just yet, I’ve committed to a consistent ritual to start my day. Wake up at 6:30am. Pump out three Morning Pages. Putting pen to paper. Showing up. Is my work done? Definitely not. But I’m closer to my goal today than I was yesterday, having spent a year writing something — anything — every day.
You can see that the theme doesn’t have to be about achieving success. It’s still not guaranteed. But I’m going to do everything I can to get there, and the best way I know how to do that is showing up.
So when I sit down to write a screenplay again or watch an award-winning short film, or when you examine your progress towards a certain resolution you’ve set for 2022, it would serve both of us well to remember this lesson on consistency that permeates the world — every world — real or imagined.
Happy New(ish) Year,
Shiv
Stories by Shiv is part of Wayfinder, a writer collective exploring questions that matter.
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