A fundamental skill for success
Polina Pompliano’s The Profile just celebrated five years of publishing consistently.
… 263 Sunday emails, 100 Profile Dossiers, and thousands of longform profiles.
Quite the achievement.
Coincidentally, I also celebrated a five-year anniversary with one of my publications, Not All News is Bad.
I realized if I had a super-power, it might be consistency.
Besides NANIB, I’ve also published:
- 900+ weekly (and for a while twice-weekly) issues of the Ask Leo! Newsletter since 2005.
- A little over a year’s worth of weekly 7 TakeAways.
- Five years of daily content over at Not All News is Bad.
- And since I took on publication in 2014, HeroicStories has been publishing twice a week as well (though that’s more of a testament to my assistant who does most of the heavy lifting).
The common thread among them all?
Consistency.
Consistency I rely on myself. I started both Not All News is Bad and 7 TakeAways for purely personal reasons. The first, to force myself to look for positive stories so often hidden in the flood of daily news, and the second to force myself to improve the quality of my daily reading.
Is what I publish successful? Yes.
Is it wildly successful? No. Consistency alone, isn’t enough. But consistency is the foundation upon which success is built.
Quoting Pompliano:
Shane Parrish recently wrote, “The hardest part is the discipline required to do otherwise ordinary things for an extraordinarily long period of time, even when the results are barely noticeable.” He adds, “Extraordinary results come from ordinary people with uncommon consistency.”
Consistency. Showing up. Doing the work. Turning the crank that drives the machine.
It all comes down to fundamentals.
If you’re a creative, if you’re an online publisher, if you’re an entrepreneur, even if you’re someone else’s employee, showing up and doing the work consistently is over half the battle.
Show up.
Do the work.
Turn the crank.