I used to think consistency is the only thing that matters. That, as a writer, an artist, an entrepreneur, all you had to do was stick with things. After five years of that, I know better.
Seth Godin wrote a brilliant little book called The Dip. It’s about this graph:
The Dip is the long slog after beginner’s luck has run out. It’s the time it gets worse before it gets better. It’s the thousands of bruised knees, crumpled drafts, and canned app updates that lie before greatness.
Most people never make it through. Clearly, consistency is important.
“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.” — Seth Godin
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. For the woodpecker, each additional tap means progress. A little less wood to chip away. For us, that’s not necessarily the case. We can keep tapping for weeks, months, years, and the tree won’t move an inch.
At some point, consistency stops working. Your growth flattens. Your work is anemic. Just enough oxygen to survive, but not enough to thrive. Seth calls this a dead-end.
As a writer, it’s very easy to let your Dip become a dead-end. We’re terrified of irrelevance, so we’d rather keep publishing consistently than plunge into a big project. Suddenly, you’re in the long trough to nothingness. You start repeating yourself, your work stops spreading and, soon, it’s you and your three first fans, nodding in a circle.
The point we miss is that consistency and relevance are not the same thing. To stay relevant, you must get better. You need more quality, not just more consistency. And the more you learn, the more time you need to get better.
I published two articles per week for over two years. At first, I learned a lot. Different types of articles, new structures, I built a big roster of templates in my head. But, eventually, I started running out of time. I now might need more than a week for just one article. That’s fine once I accept it — but doing so feels like I’m double-crossing myself.
“I worked hard for this! I’m finally consistent! Why do I have to let this go?”
The answer is that, often, the only way to improve quality is to break consistency. This is the mean law of great work.
It’s mean because first, you need to work hard to build consistency, and then you need to let go of that very thing to keep moving up. Throughout the course of most great careers, there is a slow decline in the quantity of output accompanied by a steady rise in the quality of said output. This is natural. It’s lost on many, but it’s often what dictates our limits as performers.
My graph isn’t as polished as Seth’s, but I hope it can also make a strong point:
A great writer starts at two articles a week and ends at one book per year. A great entrepreneur operates the whole business at first, but makes only a few decisions ten years in. A great dealmaker makes 100 deals in her first year and only one in her last.
When you’re starting out as a creator, an entertainer, an entrepreneur, consistency is everything. If you don’t learn to put in time, to stick to your own deadlines, to ship on command, you’ll never be professional enough. It’s not even so much about the output you create, but about becoming the kind of person who delivers output on the regular.
Early on, consistency also helps you with quality. You still learn a lot fast and there’s much ground to cover. But eventually, that tops out. You can’t get that last 10%, make the jump from good to great, by sticking to your same old rhythm. You need to go big. And going big takes time. But it’s very hard to let go of the consistency you worked so hard for in the first place.
Missing the mean law of great work can be a huge blindspot that leads to mid-career failure. If we never shift, if we forget to take a leap when we need one, our work will slowly trickle into oblivion — the irrelevance we’re so afraid of.
There are many ways to fail when it comes to the Dip. You might pick the wrong one, a bad one, or run away from picking one at all. You might quit too early or quit too late. But the worst way to fail is to quit without quitting. To trot into meaninglessness.
You have an amazing gift to share with us. Don’t you dare waste it.
Pick the biggest Dip you can find. Learn to do the work it deserves. Don’t stop until you’re through. We might not always hear from you, but we know the best when we see it. And that is the only thing that matters.