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Today at a glance:
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 37 seconds
You may be aware that in the coming weeks I will become a father.
In an effort to ensure that you still receive nuggets of wisdom in your inbox on a weekly basis, I’ve invited WISER readers just like you to write a newsletter.
Today’s WISER Newsletter comes courtesy of Journal Wiser community member John Landells.
 | I first connected with John through the WISER newsletter over a year ago. We’ve gone on to connect dozens of times since, and it’s obvious that he’s a man of wisdom. He also has a passion for music, but I’ll allow him to share more about that. Let’s get WISER together! |
✅ A Revelation About Consistency
Michael has shared on consistency before, and it’s a topic I needed to fully experience before it sunk in.
I work a demanding, full-time job, run the media team at my local church, and working as a composer.
Some weeks, it seems hard enough to simply find the time for my day job—let alone everything else!
Before I started focussing on consistency, I would compose a piece of music every few months, so even writing 10 tracks for an album to send to a publisher was a lengthy process.
This is when I learned about consistency.
Instead of waiting until I “had time”, or I “felt like” writing music, I scheduled 1 hour a day each weekday, and 2 hours on a Saturday to compose.
Some days, I really didn’t feel in the right frame of mind to write anything, but I’d force myself to sit at the keyboard and fiddle with ideas, or try new sounds until inspiration found me.
Other days, even that didn’t work, so I’d use the time to deal with updates and maintenance on my studio computer, or I’d try a new technique.
At some point, I even had the idea of trying different approaches to writing music.
Instead of sitting down and playing at the keyboard, where my hands would tend to fall into familiar patterns, I switched to an iPad app where I had to write notation by hand.
The important thing was to do something every day - no matter what excuses I could come up with.
There were of course days when this was impossible. Days when work got in the way, or when I needed to go into church on an evening to help with something.
To start with, I struggled with this as I felt like I’d failed to be consistent.
Over time though, I learned that the power of consistency comes not in doing things every day, no matter the cost, but in accepting that life happens and not letting one missed day break the habit of consistency.
The result of this was that instead of struggling to compose 10 tracks in a year, I started averaging 2 tracks a week and delivered over 100 tracks to publishers within a year.
The key to consistency is simple: be consistent, consistently!
📝 Journal Prompts
• What areas of my life that could benefit from more consistency?
• When have I been consistent before? What was different?
🎶 Music to My Ears
A huge thanks to John for sharing this principle of wisdom with the WISER community!
If you’d like to hear some of the tracks that John has composed consistently, you can listen to them here:
🧱 How to Build Consistency
And if you’d like to learn more about how you can develop consistency in whatever habit you’re trying to build, I would highly recommend checking out James Clear’s website.
He has lots of helpful articles which have helped me to develop numerous habits:
Journaling
Illustrating
Exercise
Prayer
Learn more useful tips here:
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😊 Thank You!
Thanks for checking out this issue of the WISER Newsletter. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it!
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Catch you in the next issue!
Thanks,
Michael
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