Does being strategic matter?
What matters more, being consistent, or being strategic? In this post: language learning, multitasking, and lag vs lead metrics.
Hello! You haven’t seen me in your inbox for a while. If you’re not sure who I am or what this is, I’m Mike and I write (sporadically) about creativity, work, content creation, and random experiments away from my 9-5. I also decided to incorporate my photography into these posts, because why not.
I’ve been thinking a lot about consistency lately. Partly because I’ve seen a lot of “2024 review / 2025 goals” posts in the last month, but also because it’s something I’ve always struggled a lot with.
Consistency is a superpower that I’d like to learn, as I believe it’s an important part of learning any skill or being generally “successful” (whatever that word means for you) at anything. Because of this, I’ve been thinking about areas in life where I’ve been unintentionally consistent and what there is to learn from it.
How I (sort of) learnt German
Somewhere around 2012 I found a book in my parent’s garage called deutsch einfach gemacht. Curiosity nudged me to work my way through it. This led me to more books, which led me to online learning resources and German media (shows, films, music…), which led me to communities and online language exchange platforms, which led me to travelling to Germany, meeting my girlfriend, and then eventually moving to Germany, working for a predominantly German company, and so on.
For one reason or another, over the last 10+ years I consistently turned up and practiced German. After moving to Germany, I had to turn up (almost) every day and speak German. This happened if I wanted it to or not. When dealing with German bureaucracy it was definitely not.
I did not have a structured learning plan, I did not build a clever language learning routine or even attend a single language course. I did not worry about learning German at all. I simply had so many opportunities to learn and practice over so many years, that given the circumstances, it would be more impressive if I made it this far without learning German to at least a survivable level.
This is all to say that I believe consistently turning up is guaranteed to get you somewhere, no matter how bad your strategy is, and it’s actually the most important factor for progressing in anything.
Skill-gaps and fun
I’m lucky that I had an accidental, gradual skill progression in German. I did not need to go from absolutely zero knowledge of German to needing to survive in the language on a daily basis, which many of my immigrant friends seemed to experience when they moved here.
I started learning the language before I moved to Germany, which meant I could slowly but surely grow my skills by following my curiosity and finding resources at my skill level. Learning was purely for fun and I had zero other expectations other than to keep having fun.
This is why it makes total sense that the people I know who moved to Germany with zero knowledge of German are the same people who struggle for years to learn the language. Already on day one, there is a huge mismatch in their skill-level versus their need, which ramps up the pressure to learn and use the language quickly.
With time, it gets worse. The level they feel they need to be (or should be) at is way higher than their current level, which adds more and more friction to get (or keep) going.
It’s easy to quit things when there is a huge gap between your current skill level and where you feel you need to be. There’s also no more effective way to suck out all the fun and make something impossible to keep up.
If you’re not having fun, you’ll struggle to turn up and do the thing. Sometimes that’s fine, and maybe something you should listen to. Maybe you just liked the idea of doing or being the thing, rather than actually doing or being the thing, which is totally fine and then you should quit. But you need to give yourself long enough to figure that out, and quitting at the first hurdle probably isn’t long enough.
How to actually be consistent
If you do want to keep something up, I think it boils down to three things:
Keep it fun (which I’ve written about before).
Keep it simple.
Keep your expectations low (like, really low).
If you’ve read any trendy productivity book you’ll be familiar with this in some way or another, like the two minute rule from Atomic Habits. The idea is always the same: if you want to be consistent, reduce friction as much as you possibly can, and then get going, again and again and again.
Turn up in the tiniest way possible, make it as fun and rewarding as possible, and stop worrying about the long term plan. If this works for some time and then you drop the ball, find a way to reduce again, and then… start turning up again.
The overall impact of being consistent is more important than the dips (and there will be dips) along the way. You don’t even have to optimize anything. Drop the level, make it easier and more fun, and then turn up. Long term compounding will smooth everything out, as long as you keep turning up.
I recently read about the idea that it’s hard to learn and grow from a place of defense. If you feel threatened, worried, or pressured about the thing you feel you should be learning or doing, it becomes incredibly hard to be in the right space for growth.
When to actually think about strategy
I’ve always liked the expression “get going, get good, get smart” from Ali Abdaal, even if it’s the exact advise I haven’t followed, and given the example in this post, why I’ve become stuck with my own German progression.
As soon as I hit an intermediate level, I hit the boundary where just showing up without a plan wasn’t going to improve my ability anymore. My progress slowed, I got frustrated, learning wasn’t fun anymore, so I stopped.
My temptation at that point is to push myself harder and jump straight back into the deep end — take an advanced language course, or sign up to a language exam in the hopes it motivates me to up my level. But this would just put me back into ‘playing defense’ mode. Suddenly I have an ambitious target I need to hit, so I best come up and a hardcore plan to get there… which I’ll never actually stick to.
What I should actually do is reduce the friction and make hopping back on the learning wagon as easy as possible and not worry at all about progressing further. Again, consistency has to come first, and should always be the thing to fall back to when you hit a wall.
With that said, you probably will eventually hit a barrier where you need to think about your strategy.
If consistency is firmly in place and you find your progress slowing, then you can start thinking about getting good. That’s the part where — again in the example of language learning — you actually look at your learning strategy and find more effective ways to learn, and then find ways to tweak your strategy without risking your consistency.
Tweak, keep going, then tweak again. If it gets too much and your consistency becomes at risk, then reduce and focus on that.
If you make it past this stage, then you can really start to get smart. Again, in the context of language learning, this might be the point to look at your level in detail and then start trying to plug very specific gaps in your knowledge.
Multitasking is procrastination
I’m a serial multitasker. My list of purchased & abandoned domains only supports this theory. Starting new projects is exciting and it feels like progress, so why start one project when you can start six? Why just learn German when you can learn three other languages at the same time? Why start a newsletter if you can also start a podcast, a YouTube channel, a business, and so on.
My experience here is that it simply doesn’t work. The only thing you will do consistently is to not progress in any of your projects in any meaningful way.
What I’m reminding myself of this year is that, if I really want to improve, I should pick one central project, one theme for my year, and drop everything else. Focusing on consistently showing up for one thing at a time is more than enough.
Lag metrics and lead metrics
There is an old Reddit post on how to get to the top of any creator market which offers the example of lead vs lag metrics as a mental model for the impact of consistency and how to think about it.
A lag metric is a long term goal — the result you’re going for. “I have a C2 certificate in German to prove my fluency”, or “I’m a YouTube partner”. A lag metric takes time to measure or show impact. Hence, it lags. It’s a reflection of what you did, looking back, rather than what you’re doing now.
A lead metric is a predictor for achieving the goal. It’s what you think you should do to get where you want to go — “I do 15 mins of German practice every day”. It leads you in the right direction. In reality you will probably skip some days, do 2 mins the next day, 20 the next, and so on. Just keep turning up and let time and consistency smooth this out. Compounding will work wonders eventually.
My theme for 2025
This post is a letter to myself, and sums up my own intentions for 2025. My theme for 2025 is the answer to the title of this post. For me, right now: consistency matters, strategy doesn’t.
Last year for me involved a lot of experimentation and playing around with different projects, which I’m glad I did. But I didn’t stick with any one thing long enough to know if it felt right for me. Alongside switching jobs at my 9-5, I wrote posts for this newsletter, I launched a podcast (and then let it fizzle out), I filmed (and then didn’t publish) several YouTube videos, I started posting my photography on Instagram and on my photo/travel blog (which I also built & launched during the year).
I very much like launching random projects.
Funnily enough, I already hit the ‘defensive barrier’ with this post. I had intended to publish it 3 weeks ago, but felt like it wasn’t good enough or clear enough — “What’s the point of this article, does it make sense for my audience? Will anyone read it? What’s my strategy with this newsletter, anyway?” Instead, it was easier to do nothing. Worse, it sat in my drafts and I didn’t write anything else either because I felt bad about not finishing this post first.
So instead, I’m hitting publish right now, knowing it’s not perfect, but still a way of practicing consistently writing & publishing something.
If you’ve started any ambitious projects this year and feel yourself slipping as we head into February, I hope this post acts as a tiny reminder to look at how you can make things simpler again.
✍️ Quote of the week
💎 Favourite articles I read lately
Most of these are on similar topics to ‘consistency’ and can be found right here on Substack:
I loved this article by Henrik Karlsson on viewing life as a multi-armed bandit, exploration vs exploitation, and how to choose what to focus on. I also loved Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process.
Self-releasing in 2024 by Brian d’Souza — A super interesting an open guide on running an independent record label and what it’s like to release music online in 2024, including a look at the metrics and financials.
The art of digging your heels in from Nathaniel Drew — a short post about keeping going despite turbulence, and making things into a game.