Being Consistent Won't Make You Successful Anymore – And It's One of the Greatest Lies Ever Told

Author James Clear is dead wrong

Image Credit: Midjourney

Social media is full of success p0rn.

It makes me cringe. Every time I read an essay, book or viral post about success, it always contains some basic b*tch version of “just be consistent.” Before AI went mainstream in 2022, just being consistent may have been enough.

Now, in 2025, being consistent is a joke.

The viral idea of being consistent came from the popular book by James Clear called “Atomic Habits.” Just build the habit and be consistent, and all your unicorn & rainbow fantasies will come true.

Wrong.

If all it took to be successful was consistency, then every masturbat0r in the world would eventually be dating a supermodel.

Wanting a goal isn’t enough. Doing it every day isn’t enough.

There’s a different approach I’ve unlocked after making it to the top 1% in my field. It’s not what you think and the gurus aren’t talking about it.

The subtle shift in thinking that can make anyone a high performer (even if you’re an average Joe)

The best example I can think of to illustrate this point is market stall owners.

Every Sunday artists go to their local market and sell their artwork. I’ve spent plenty of time at these markets and spoken to the owners.

What I’ve found is they have the daily habit but their execution is off. Attending markets every week to sell their artwork won’t make them Picasso. Some of the stall owners I met have been doing it 20 years. If all it took was to create art and ask people to buy it, we’d all be Picassos.

The Sunday market stall owner mindset has bled into many fields.

Writers often do the same. They think if they show up every day and write, that’s all it takes to go viral or get a book deal.

In the last 11 years I’ve met writers who’ve made exactly that mistake. Most of them are starving or have gone back to cubicle jobs they hate. Don’t get me wrong, you need to do the thing daily.

But here’s the big missing piece…

The habit of being consistent needs to be paired with extreme intensity. The best way to do that is to chase an obsession and act extreme.

That means you take the daily habit, let’s say writing, and you become unreasonable. You do what no one else is prepared to do. You have an extreme sense of urgency. You turn 5 year goals into 30 day goals.

When I rose to the top of Medium dot com I did this by accident. I had the daily writing habit like every other writer on the platform, but I went to the extreme.

• They wrote one essay a week. I published an essay every day.

• They quietly asked for people to join their email list. I screamed at people to join mine.

• They only wrote on Medium. I wrote on 3 other platforms at the same time.

• They made a few thousand dollars. I made 7-figures. I was pulling $70K months.

• Their writing sessions were 1-2 hours. Mine were 12 hours without a break done in the most extreme flow state you’ve ever seen.

I didn’t start out loving writing, but I became obsessed with it. I pushed the limits of what was possible. I nearly broke the relationship with my now-wife.

I think the main reason I did it is because of death.

In 2015 I had a near-miss with cancer. It chucked a spanner in my brain and made me go insane. I came face-to-face with death. Then I made friends with a man named Michael Crossland. He nearly died 4 times from cancer. He’s dancing with death every day and knows he’ll likely lose.

His attitude is extreme like mine.

He went from giving free talks to RSL clubs full of grandpas, to speaking on the world stage and getting paid millions of dollars to do so. The same pattern appeared in him.

He was unreasonable enough to push harder, to ask for more.

He did more free talks in a year than everyone else. During every talk he sharpened his cancer story. Then a Facebook page named Goalcast eventually got hold of a video of one of his talks. They posted it.

Tens of millions of people watched it. That gave him the push he needed.

Being consistent is absolute freaking insanity

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Sound familiar? That’s consistency.

Consistency = Insanity

The average person I meet who believes in the lie of consistency does the same daily habit for an ungodly amount of time and expects that one day they will 100% be successful. It’s the wrong kind of delusional.

If you’re consistent but don’t take extreme action and pair that with rapid iteration, the results won’t change. You’ll start to rely on luck or hope, and at that point you may as well go to Vegas and become a machine by playing the slot machines.

Being extremely obsessive is different

The problem with consistency is it’s lukewarm.

When we see a consistent person we’re unlikely to take notice. Most people’s consistency is quietly invisible.

It gets worse.

Consistent people often believe everybody is watching them. Science calls this the spotlight effect. In reality, though, despite the fact they think everyone is reading their social media posts… no one is.

The spotlight effect is a cognitive bias where people tend to overestimate how much others are paying attention to them, their mistakes, or their flaws. It leads individuals to believe they are the center of attention, like a spotlight shining on them, even when others are not noticing them as much as they think. – The Decision Lab

Being extremely obsessive is different. It’s impossible to ignore.

When I wrote on Medium, like a psychopath, everyone on the platform knew who I was even if they hated me (some did). I was impossible to ignore. I jammed my writing down people’s throats until they choked.

Choosing an obsession and using extreme action makes you magnetic.

The big reason is because to act this way you need high energy. You can’t do the hard work and have people notice it without having the energy. Because the default person in society has low energy, we’re subconsciously attracted to high-energy people.

To get the high energy, I learned from Tony Robbins about the importance of eating plants. I learned how to create a mission rather than exist and settle for second best.

People who are obsessed have an aura around them. They quickly become leaders. They get talked about a lot because it’s so rare. These outcomes automate the path to success better than any other strategy.

The best part is you don’t need to be rich or have a high IQ to become like this.

Being obsessed is a choice. Only when you understand it’s power, would you ever dare to try it – and once you do, you’re life will never be the same again.

In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious – Robert Greene

How to transcend consistency and become extremely obsessed

These ideas will help you migrate from a consistency mindset with cookie-cutter James Clear habits… to chasing your obsession with an extreme mindset.

1. Ask yourself this easy question

What’s reasonable? Now do the opposite. Then triple down on it.

2. Look at how the average person thinks

Now interrogate every one of their average ideas until you see the delusions. I try to do the exact opposite of the average person in any field.

3. Put in real hours

Not 30 mins here, 60 mins there. Something more extreme. Lock in on a small project and do it for 16 hours in a flow state without doing anything else.

You won’t feel burnout. What you will have is a religious experience.

"People who obsess about work life balance are typically mediocre at both. Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life" – Alex Hormozi

4. Learn about higher states of consciousness

Most people in your field operate from low-level consciousness. Once you upgrade to higher states the world looks different. You’ll turn news and politics off. And when someone writes a hit piece on you, you won’t read it or respond.

5. Become more selfish

Your fellow humans will love to waste your time. Start being more selfish. Do things out of self-interest. Don’t accept “pick your brain” meetings. Make your default answer to every ask “No.” Don’t sugarcoat where you’re at.

“Look Jan, I’m dialled in right now and am not entertaining any conversations outside of the mission. I have 30 days to build this. Anything outside of building is a distraction.”

6. Become painfully aware of shiny objects

Every time I want to do something new my business partner says “Is this a shiny object?” This question acts as a pattern interrupt.

Most people get distracted by shiny objects. Tools. AI. Moving from one mission to the next. Drowning in guru talk full of conflicting opinions.

The action you must take each day is normally the hardest one.

• In business, the hard thing is talking to clients and asking for money.

• In fitness, it’s going to the gym and beating your personal best.

• In writing, it’s reaching out to creators to swap engagement on each other’s posts.

• In health, it’s resisting junk food for 90 days and only eating natural foods that come from farms.

We’ll do anything we can to avoid discomfort. An extreme mindset worships the opposite. Extreme people do anything they can to ONLY do the hard thing until it rips their face off and causes an injury.

7. Give up the idea of getting rich to never work anymore

Retirement is a joke. I will never retire.

And I have zero interest in getting rich to never work again. Wanting to NOT work is the problem. Believing in passive income is also dangerous.

This Reddit post explains the bizarre problem:

Solution (via @BoringBiz on X ):

“The personality that allows you to become rich prevents you from stopping work once you become rich.”

You don’t want to quit work. No. You want to do work that doesn’t feel like work. Work should feel effortless.

8. Take a habit and make it a death pledge

Constantly changing from one mission to the next holds you back.

Choose one goal to pursue and commit to doing it until you’re dead. So many decisions, options, and distractions disappear when you do.

You likely don’t need a new idea, mission, or goal. You need to pursue the same goal for longer with 10x the intensity you currently have. People should call you a psychopath. That’s how you know you’re being intense enough.

“I’d rather die with memories than fantasies.” – Codie Sanchez

Final Thought

When you ditch consistency and chase an obsession with an extreme mindset, life gets stupidly simple. All the overthinking disappears. The clarity it brings places a stick of dynamite up your butt which gets you to blow up online.

Up your intensity. Have an extreme sense of urgency. Act in an extreme way. Choose the extreme option. Work harder on a goal than seems rational. That’s how you defeat the mediocre consistent people with a farmer’s market mindset.

Tell me in the comments section below whether you think consistency is a bad idea or whether you think I’m crazy (I want my ideas challenged and read every comment).

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P.S. If you're reading this, it's a private note for you.

I just recorded a private 32-minute training on the 3-step strategy I used to grow my business from 0 to $100K/mo in just 6 months.

Just reply to my Substack email of this newsletter with “video” and I’ll send it over.

No strings attached. Just want to give out some value to the consistent readers.