How to Be Consistent: A Simple Secret to Personal Development

Today we're going to be talking about a very simple secret to success, how to be more consistent, how to take action every single day, and how to build the habits in your life that will change the direction and course of your life. Tune in. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. It is extremely simple. It is extremely important, but it's pretty hard for most people, and that's why most people don't do it. And I'm also going to teach you how Jerry Seinfeld uses this technique, or had used this technique when he was a new comic, to become one of the greatest and wealthiest comedians, probably the wealthiest comedian that's ever walked the face of the earth.

And what I actually call it is I call it the law of 100. It's very, very simple. So here's what you need to do, okay? You need to think to yourself, what is the one thing, what is the one habit that I need to build in myself that would change my life the most? And so what we like to call these as keystone habits, a keystone habit.

So if you go back and look at what a keystone was in the ancient Roman times, a keystone was the stone that was at the very centre of an arch. The reason why it's the most important stone is because when it's locked in place, it locks all of the other stones of the arch in place. And what it means is that one stone affects all of the other stones. 

And so when you're thinking about the one habit that you want to do, the reason why it's called a keystone habit is because that one habit affects many other areas of your life. It's very simple though. Let's say, for instance, you decide, you know, the thing that would make the biggest difference in my life is that if I woke up early. 

Now waking up early one day, like most people, I say, I'm going to wake up and have a morning routine. And so I'm gonna wake up at 5 a.m. and I'm going to meditate and I'm going to read and I'm going to go for a run and I'm going to work out and I'm to do. That's not your keystone habit. Your keystone habit would literally just be waking up at 5 o'clock in the morning every single day. That's it. Because when you wake up one morning, you might decide, you know what? I feel like reading today. 

And you just read a little bit. And then you wake up at 5 o'clock another day and you're like, you know what? I have a lot of energy today. I'm going to go for a run. And then it turns into going for a run. And then it might be meditating one day and it might be something else another day. But what happens is that one keystone habit affects so many other areas of your life. And that's what you want to find. So for some people, waking up early tends to be a keystone habit. For some people, going in and working out every single day tends to be a keystone habit. 

Because, you know, all you have to do is go into the gym, you do your workout, and that's it. And as long as you get the workout done, that's your keystone habit completed. But what other areas of your life does it affect? Well, after a while, you might say, you know what? I've been working out so much, I'm gonna stop drinking as much. You know what? I've been working out so much, I'm gonna start more water. You know what? I've been working out so much, I'm gonna eat a little bit healthier. You know what? I've been working out so much, I'm gonna get some better sleep.

And it affects many other areas of your life. And so what you want to do is this. With the Law of 100, you find one thing that is a keystone habit for you that is going to affect many other areas of your life. And you decide that thing, that habit that you're going to create, that action that you need to take in your business, whatever it might be. What is that one action that you're going to take? Decide it right now. We're going to do this together. And then you do that one thing for 100 days straight. That's it. Now, I don't say like, okay, wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, only Monday through Friday. 

No, wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning every single day for 100 days if that's what you want to do. Workout or at least get into the gym or do some form of physical fitness every single day for the next 100 days. Make 100 cold calls in your business every single day for the next 100 days. Whatever it is, you identify that one thing and you do it every single day. Here's the key to it. You're probably not going to be able to do it with your current schedule, which means things are going to need to change. 

Your schedule is going to need to change. You're going to need to figure out how to get yourself more time to do this. And you are going to need to change. You're going to need to figure out. And so it's not going to be super comfortable, but it's something that you need to do. And what I recommend, here's what I really recommend is disappear for 100 days. 

And what I mean by disappearing is like, don't leave your family. Like obviously, if you have things that you have to do with your family, do your family stuff, but disappear from all of your friends for 100 days. Just say, hey, I'm really working myself the next 100 days. I'll see you in a few months. Disappear from being on social media, disappear from everything that you're, you know, your social life, whatever it is, you can always go back to it. But what you're really trying to do is you're really trying to take 100 days to solely focus on you. 

So if you have a family, obviously, you have familial obligations, you've got to do that stuff. But if you're, but if you're single, like, just disappear, just do whatever it is that you do for work, come home and freaking work on yourself. If you're trying to drive it, drive your new business that you just started, well, then go to go to work, whatever you got to do during your day job, and then come home and disappear into your work for 100 days. 

Because here's what's real crazy. When you disappear for just 100 days, and you do one thing consistently every single day for 100 days, you're very different with a different set of habits in 100 days. So it's super simple. It's not hard. I told you it's very simple, but it's, it's not hard, but it is difficult for people. Step one is you decide what the action is. And step two is you do it every single day for 100 days. Don't allow yourself to make all of the BS excuses that come up because some of you guys are like, yes, this is awesome. I can do it.

And there's a portion of people listening right now. They're like, I don't know if I can do that. But Rob, oh, but Rob, you don't know my life. Oh, but you don't know my schedule. Right? So don't make excuses. Don't self sabotage. 

Do that one thing every single day for 100 days. And let me tell you a few reasons why this is extremely important. Number one, over my lifetime, I've been able to develop some really great relationships with people who have been quite successful, right? What I have tend to, what I've found out with them is that successful people are not that smart. 

They're not smarter than everybody else. Whatever success means to you, whether that's great parents or whether that's tons of money or whether it's great business owners or the happiest people you could find, whatever success means to you, successful people are the most consistent people. They're not smarter. They're not, they don't have better willpower. Most of the time, they've just decided to be consistent. They wake up every single day and they do the things that they need to do in order to get them from where they are to where they want to be. 

Right? Someone who's really wealthy, they worked really consistently and didn't give up. Someone who is in incredible shape, if that's what success means to you, they were very consistent in the way that they worked out and the way that they ate. Someone who's extremely calm and centered and peaceful, they were very consistent in being mindful in meditating and doing breath work and being present. 

They were just very, very consistent. Success comes from consistency and consistency compounds over time. And so you might think, oh, it's only a hundred days, but every, every single day that you do it, you get a little bit better. And now when you go into, so if you do this thing for seven days, right? You're going to be better in seven days than you are today. So when you go into that thing, seven days from today and you do it again, that little bit better version of you is now doing it. That success compounds over time. 

So the most successful people are just the most consistent. The people who fail the most, failure just comes from giving up. Literally, you can only fail at something when you give up at something. You can't fail if you just don't give up. If you decide I'm to do this and I'm going to do this until I die. You can't, you can't lose. 

If you decide this is the business that I'm starting and I'm going to do this eventually a year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years down the road, you will get to whatever quote unquote successes for you. You just can't give up. So step one, decide what the action is. Step two, do it every single day for a hundred days. And let me explain why this is important to you in the way that your brain actually works. Let me give you an analogy. 

Okay. Your brain is like a forest and you know, if you've ever walked through a forest and there's, it's really dense and you have to have a machete to kind of chop through stuff. But every once in a while you're walking through a forest and there is a path that you can see that other people have walked down over and over and over and over and over again. 

And because it's been trampled on and walked down so much, it's a lot easier to walk down that path. Right? Well, some of us have habits that we don't really want anymore, but it's very easy. It's like walking down that path where we're walking down that path of, oh, we've hit the snooze button so many times. 

It's just very easy to stay in that habit of just hitting the snooze button and not waking up when we really want it to, because that is just a habit. It's a well-worn path in the brain that we have. What we're doing and what we're doing in this moment, we're talking about doing something with the Law of 100. 

The next 100 days is about taking out the machete and just hacking a new way through the forest for the next 100 days. It's going, okay, you know, this waking up thing, I'm not good at it. If this is, you know, the example I'm giving, if this is what you decide, this waking up thing, I'm not good at it, but you know what I'm going to do? Knowing that it's going to be a struggle, I'm going to take out my machete in my brain and I'm going to hack a new way in the forest. 

And I will get aggressive at making sure this habit that I know will change my life is something that I build into my daily practice. Your brain will eventually adapt. What is foreign and not comfortable to you right now will become easy as time goes on.

You get to a point where if waking up early is the thing that you want to work on, where it might be really hard the first week to wake up at 5 a.m. or 530, whatever time you say you want to wake up. It's hard because it's something completely different. The same way that it's really hard to just hack away at a force with a machete. 

But the more you do it consistently day after day after day, the more this path becomes well-worn. And by the end of 100 days, if you do it 100 days in a row, you're probably going to be waking up before your alarm goes off. That's how you turn something into a habit. 

That's the beautiful thing about being a human is we have something called neuroplasticity, which means that you can change your brain whenever you want to. Your brain, your habits, who you are is not set in stone. You can change these at any moment. It just takes consistency and it takes a lot of effort. You've got to put a lot of effort into it. And so the way that Jerry Seinfeld used this, and I wrote about this in my book, Level Up. 

He used this where there was a, it's called a Seinfeld calendar. There was a young comic that came up to him one day and he was, they were in the back behind the stage and he's like, Jerry, you know, I'm a, I'm a young comic. I want to know what did you do when you were in my shoes to get you to be better? And he said, well, what I did was I got a big, huge calendar.I put it up on the wall and I would force myself to write jokes every single day. He's like, some days I wrote good jokes. Most days I wrote crappy jokes, but I wanted to just build the muscle of being consistent in writing jokes every single day. 

And what I would do is as soon as I was done writing jokes, I would go to the calendar and I had a red marker and I'd put an X on that day for getting that day taken care of. And then the next day I would do the same thing. I'd write the jokes and then put an X on that calendar. 

The next day I put an X in my calendar. And eventually you have a calendar that has a string of X's that are going across it. And you're 10 days in the last thing that you want to do is break that, that, that consistency that you have.So the consistency actually starts to become a little bit addicting to you. Don't want to break it. And once again, these things are not really hard. 

Like to do this stuff is not hard to wake up early. It's not really that hard to decide to go to the gym is not really that hard. Whatever it is that to make a hundred cold calls is really not that hard. Whatever it is that you decide that you need to do success is really not that hard. It's all so simple. There's an action.The action needs to be taken. I need to take the action. It's very simple, but what ends up happening? We think too much and we make it really freaking hard. 

We make it so hard on ourself. I always tell people if, if I had the opportunity, like if I had the, if it was possible for there's a brain, you know, switch on the side of your brain for me to turn off the thinking part of your brain, the fear part of your brain, the amygdala that puts out all of the fears and all of the limiting beliefs. And I could just flip a switch and just turn it off for a little while.

Everybody would just take action because taking action isn't hard. How do we make it hard? By thinking too much, by fears, by limiting beliefs. You just have to be committed and not give up.The most successful people that I know are committed. They're not the smartest people. They weren't born rich. Actually, majority of them weren't born rich at all. I don't think any of them were born rich. 80% of millionaires in America were born middle-class or lower-class into lower-class families. 

So it's not like they were just given the perfect life. They just decided that hard work and dedication was going to be something that they were going to build into themselves. The beautiful thing about being a human is that you could have a brand new life in 12 months. You could have a brand new life in three years, five years. What if I told you, if you worked really hard at something every single day for the next three years, you would be guaranteed to make $5 million. Guaranteed. 

There's no doubt, absolutely, 100% you're making $5 million. Would you go forward and not give up? Absolutely. If you were guaranteed, 100% guaranteed, would you? Yes. 

The problem is you think too much. You think about, oh, well, what if this doesn't work out? What if I'm not good enough? What if I'm not smart enough? You got to learn to turn that part of your brain off. And even though you don't believe in yourself, and even though you've got fears, and even though you've got limiting beliefs, as we all do, you're still going to do it. 

You don't have to believe in yourself in order to take action. Belief is not a prerequisite to taking action. But what if you just started and you didn't stop? People give up too often, and they don't realize how close they are to a breakthrough. They'll have breakdowns, and they're like, I can't do this anymore. After a breakdown usually comes a breakthrough. And most people give up after a breakdown. 

Oh, they think it's not for me. This is a sign I'm not supposed to do this. What if it was just a different flip of your mind of like, okay, this breakdown right here, this is the universe testing me, testing me to see if I really want it. 

I'm not going to give up. Because think about this. Think about your life.

How many times have you given up on yourself? How many times have you given up on yourself? Over and over. How many times you say you're going to do that workout plan, you're going to stick with it, and then you give up on yourself? How many times you said you're going to start a business, and you didn't do it? How many times you said you're going to do something, and you just didn't do it? Over and over and over and over and over again. What if this from this moment on, you just decided when I start something, I will follow through. 

The past version of me gave up all the time. The past version of me, yeah, didn't follow through on anything. But I'm not going to be that person anymore. 

The new version of me will make a decision to do something and will take action on that thing. I just will not give up on myself anymore. Where would you be if you didn't give up on that thing five years ago that you thought was so amazing for you? Probably way further ahead than you are right now, right? Okay, well, if that's the case, where could you be in five years from today if you decided what it is that you wanted to do and you didn't give up on yourself? Because it's not going to happen immediately. 

You don't go to the gym and then look in the mirror and have a six-pack. It doesn't happen that way. Great things take time. It takes time to build yourself into the person that you want. It takes time to build your mindset into being the type of mindset that you want. It takes time to build your body into the type of body that you want. 

Success doesn't happen overnight. It's like that Chinese bamboo story, the Chinese bamboo story where you plant a seed and you have to water it and give it sun and take care of it for six years before it ever comes out of the soil. Six years, nothing. And then in the sixth year, it grows up to 80 feet in six weeks, up to two feet a day sometimes. That's a lot of the way that success is. You don't see anything for a while and then boom, hockey stick moment, it takes off.