Learning to Learn - 1. Consistency

Consistency is a really important concept when it comes to getting good at something, and it’s something which I think has alot of pitfalls that you can fall into if you don’t understand it correctly. This is a concept that I really struggled with for a long time, and because of it, it really held me back in many ways in my life.

But first, we have to understand an important concept:

Performances are random

Before we talk about consistency, the first thing to understand is your performances are randomised. When I say performance, it is essentially how well you do on any given day or any particular action. It could be whether you win a game or not in overwatch. It could be whether an illustration you’re working on reachs your expectations or not.

The way that I like to imagine it is like a normal distribution. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a way to model probabilities of random events occuring. To keep it simple, it more or less just says that most of the time, we will perform close to average. However, sometimes we will have those good days, where we perform much better than normal, and to balance that out, we will have bad days where we perform worse.

As much as we would like to think that our actions will determine our results, it’s very important to acknowledge that some aspect of performance will always be tied to random chance. Sometimes we’ll just have good days and sometimes not. That’s okay and perfectly normal.

It’s unrealistic to “just aim for the highest result”

Why is it important to understand the concept of randomness? I’ve observed this in myself as well as plenty of people in my life. Though I might not have able to formulate it into words at the time, I believed in my heart that performance was solely determined by how hard I tried.

If I performed poorly, I got discouraged and told myself that I should have “simply tried harder”. What that meant exactly I wasn’t sure, but I was positive that if I had just worked a little bit harder, maybe put in a few more hours, things would have turned out better.

On the other hand, if I ever performed above average, I got a massive dopamine rush. I’d think to myself: “Wow! This is what I’m capable of! This is the level that I am able to work at if I just put effort in”.

The problem with this way of thinking is that I had implicitly set an impossible expectation for myself that I would be able to achieve my top performance every time, if only I worked hard enough. Imagine trying to roll a 6 every time by willing it into existence, or hitting the bullseye every time by “focusing harder”. Our performance is random, and that by the simple laws of probability, playing at your best every single time is simply impossible. Therefore inevitably, when the average and bad days came by, I would be left blindsided and frustrated every time, despondently wondering why I seemed to be doing so much worse than “that one time”.

And of course, this tended to have a snowball effect. My mood was typically so negative that it would turn some average days into bad days and some bad days into miserable ones. By adopting this mindset, I had unwittingly shifted my performance so that on average, I actually was performing worse than normal. Countless hours could have been saved if I had better understood this randomness, and instead of working on replicating my best performances, instead worked on increasing my worst.

Be better at your worst

Consistency is quite simply the difference between your best and worst performances. If we’re still talking about normal distributions, consistency would be the idea of Variance or Standard Deviation. A consistent person turns up to work every day and just… works. Their standards are more or less the same every day. They may not perform exceptionally well on any particular day, but also their worst days, all things considered, don’t end up affecting their work or mood that much. In contrast, an inconsistent person is exactly what I described before. They will have runs of good days followed by terrible days. Every day seems to be a coin-toss to them outside of their control, and because of that, they struggle to have any self-confidence in themselves, or become someone reliable for others.

In poker, there is a concept of your A-game, B-game and C-game. Your A-game is when you playing out of your mind. You’re winning hand after hand and raking in the big bucks. Your B-game is your average day. Winning a few, losing the same amount. In the end, you may end up a little better or worse, but nothing to overall? An uneventful day. Finally your C-game is your bad days. The losing streaks. Where everything you try to make just doesn’t seem to work out. It’s a commonly agreed upon idea among Poker pros that if you were to pick one of these to work on, you should work the most on improving (or ideally eliminating) your C-game. It’s a perhaps counterintuitive idea that says that you shouldn’t focus on playing better overall. Instead, you should focus on your worst moments.

And it’s not just poker. If you’ve ever heard advice about working out (or really any habit in general), people say the same thing: It doesn’t matter how hard you work on any given day, it’s the days that you don’t feel like coming which are the most crucial that you show up anyway. Famous writers and artists often talk about how it is important to keep producing work, even on the days that inspiration isn’t there.

So why do so many experts across so many fields emphasise consistency on the days that you don’t feel like giving your all? Why not just focus your energy on making sure you are winning more than you are losing? I think there are two main benefits:

Why performing consistently is so important

Firstly, being more consistent gives you a stronger understanding of your true skill level and lets you set expectations. Imagine having confidence in how long it will take for you to complete a task. Or the amount of value you will likely generate from doing a certain amount of work. Now imagine how demotivating it would be if you had no idea how long you’d take, or whether doing something would even work out. Big difference right? It means that you can make promises to others, and perhaps more importantly, promises to yourself as well about your level of performance.

Secondly, being consistent makes you feel as though you have control even in our worst moments. Whenever we perform poorly for an extended period of time, with seemingly no perceivable way to get out, this is what sets up a feeling of hopelessness. In gaming, this is often referred to as “tilt”, which I think is term that perfectly encapsulates the feeling I’m trying to describe. It’s typically a state where you feel frustrated and hopeless, and your decision-making suffers as a result. You may become aggragavated at the game, other players, or yourself. It’s pretty well-known that tilt often gives rise to a snowball effect, where the negative emotions exacerbate the poor performance, thus creating more failures and furhter feeding stronger emotions. Lowering the severity of your poor performances on your mood goes a long way to avoiding entering this negative feedback loop all together.

So how can we be more consistent?

I think there are a four key things that you can do to improve your consistency.

1. Be honest with your expectations

We talked about this above already. Be realistic about the performance of others as well as yourself. People who have set good expectations for themselves tend to celebrate the wins, but aren’t disappointed by the losses.

2. Minimise randomness

As much as possible, remove things that could affect your performance. In overwatch terms, this meant practicing my aim for 15 minutes before every play session, so I knew I could rely on it before I started every match. It also meant turning off team and voice chats, so that I could just focus on my games without worrying about being flamed on my worse performing days (of which there were many lol), It’s something that I know from experience not only affects the current game, but which I carry into the subsequent games as well. If it’s badminton, it might be buying that headband that keeps the sweat out of your eyes. If it’s drawing, it might be finally upgrading your computer to something that doesn’t lag or randomly crash every time you draw. Whatever it takes to make sure your environment isn’t the reason to blame when things go wrong.

3. Recognising tilt early, and quitting if needed

It’s very important to recognise when you are tilted. This can be harder than you think because the tilted mind doesn’t always like to admit that it is tilted. When you’re tilted, your decision making ability is heavily affected, and often times, you may find yourself wanting to “play one more game to win it back” or “go just a little bit longer”. I find it useful to train yourself to have moments of self-reflection, where you stop all activities for a couple seconds, take a deep breath, and honestly reflect on your current state. More often than not, quitting or taking a break might be just what you need to mentally reset and come back in a calmer state, more ready to perform at your best.

4. Set up systems for when you’re at your worst.

Systems are a flowcharts that you can fallback upon whenever you feel like you aren’t performing well. A good system will be one where there are clear directions, directions that even you in your most tilted state can still follow. The idea is that while these systems may not necessarily guarantee that you start performing well again, at the very least they establish a baseline level of performance that you can fall back on.

This also ties into the idea of reducing randomness, because you have a very concrete series of steps to follow, in comparison on waiting desperately for that “magic moment” to get yourself back into the game. The secondary benefit of course, is that having a system will give you something to iterate and improve on, but more on that in the next post!

Summary

• Your performance on any given day is random.
  • Be honest about your true skill level
• Being consistent is better than chasing your highs, even if it makes you worse overall.
  • It gives you a baseline level of performance that you can fall back on.
  • It helps avoid the snowball effect of the tilt.
• To improve consistency, you should:
  1. Be honest about your expectations
  2. Minimise randomness
  3. Set up systems for when you’re at your worst
  4. Recognise tilt early, and quit if needed

If you’re reading this, I encourage to pick something in your life that you are currently working towards, and have a good honest look at your consistency. Have you set realistic expecations for yourself? Do you have ways to keep going even when you’re feeling your worst?