Peter Szabo answers how to become more consistent without burning out. He recommends clarifying your "why" by writing two lists (10 reasons to achieve the goal and 10 costs of not achieving it), journaling to identify patterns and triggers (noting that impulsivity and distractions often masquerade as lack of consistency), and simplifying life-priority tracking to three or four core areas (examples: health, wealth, happiness/love) to make daily management sustainable.
Chapters
How can I become more consistent with doing things that I know will help me so much more without getting burnt out and given up? Do you have any advice for balancing these key aspects in your life and given enough time to each? Okay, good question. And it is a loaded question, right? Because I could give you many different answers. I'll try to give you a couple and then you can maybe pick and choose or try one at a time, right? One thing would be just getting clear on your why, your reasons, right? We humans are big on incentives, right? The reason we do what we do as humans at a very fundamental level is to gain pleasure and avoid pain, right? We just have these human needs, we have to meet them. And in a nutshell, that's what we do, right? So if you want to do something, want to achieve something, and you're not quite consistent enough, or maybe you don't try hard enough, or you don't show up, a simple but very overlooked place to look is just at your list of reasons. You know, I would literally write down 10 +10 reasons why you need to achieve it, why you must get there, how it's going to change your life, the benefits it's going to give you right away, the bigger benefits you're going to experience in the future. And then I would create Another list of 10 things of what are the things it's going to cost you if you don't achieve it, if you miss out, if you, you know, like, what has it already cost you for not having these results? Essentially, you're writing down the outcome and you're creating leverage, you're creating drivers, you're creating motivation, because you're going to write down 10, 10 things, why you must achieve it, and why is it going to be extremely painful if you don't? So that's one very simple thing you can do because that will already start to align you in the right direction. Now, another thing, of course, with memory flipping would be just sitting down and journaling and then starting to notice these patterns. Like, you know, you say you want to be consistent with one thing, but then you mentioned you don't want to give up, you don't want to burn out. So, so what happens when you fail? Burnt out? Or maybe when you give up or maybe when you procrastinate, like, what are the patterns? And then from there you could just use the three questions to kind of reverse engineer and figure out why are you inconsistent, right? Like, how do you know this is a problem? What's the emotion? And when have you first felt it? I noticed that people who tend to have issues with consistency, they have also issues with impulsivity, right? So they can be consistent. You know, they decide and they'll like, hey, I'll eat this diet, I'll do this kind of thing. And they do it for a little bit, but then something happens, something comes along, they feel really bad and boom, they eat a chocolate cake. Why is that? Right. What if I ask you this question? What if the issue wasn't the consistency, but what if the issue was that something triggered you and that made you make an impulsive, compulsive decision to eat a chocolate cake to feel better? Right. So that's a million dollar question right there. Often people don't struggle with the thing, with the consistency, they struggle with the inverse of it, which is impulsivity and, and being distracted and, you know, binge eating and stuff like that. That's the issue. They get rid of that. It'll be easier to be consistent. Right? Another example to, to drive this point home, people struggle with focus, but really what they struggle with is not focus, not concentration. They struggle with distractions, they struggle with wasting time. You know, the moment they get rid of the distractions and, and they eliminate all this waste of time, well, boom, automatically you have focus, you have concentration, right? So that would be a second thing I would recommend. And, you know, then there's extra stuff I could talk about, but I think these would be good starting points. And as far as balancing key aspects of life, I would recommend just pick and choose maybe three or four categories that are most important to you, and then that's kind of what you can look at each and every day in your life sheet. Your life map. For me, it's health, wealth, happiness, or sometimes I chunk it into four. Health, wealth, love, and happiness. If I keep health, wealth, happiness, I just kind of put love underneath happiness. And then I know what these things mean to me. I know what I want to track, I know what the goals I want. And then those are kind of like the three balls that I'm trying to juggle. Now some people, they say, no, no, no, you should have 5 or 7 or 10 or 12 areas of life that you manage and you juggle. You know, family, friends, professional, work, time, this and that. And, you know, it's nice to have such a detailed, clear picture in theory, but I've tried it and, and I can tell you that the way people count is 1, 2, 3, many, right? The human brain way we think is 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 too many, right? So that's why you want to keep the number small enough so that you can actually juggle it in the long term. You know, you can certainly come up with seven different areas. But the issue there is it becomes too complex. It's hard to follow through, it's hard to do every day. And if you don't do it every day, then what's the point? Right? Because that's where the benefit comes from. So, like I said, to keep it simple, I've tried the complex and the simple ones. I found that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Right. Like Da Vinci said. So choose three or four, and three or four balls a person can manage to juggle and stay on top of. That's what I would recommend. Sa.
