Consistent Practice Over Outcome Comparison
Commit to a schedule, not to constantly measuring your performance
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 68%
When you judge each attempt against the best performer in a field, you fall short every time and abandon the pursuit. Angner's alternative is to detach the practice from the scorecard. First you select which hill to climb, a decision driven by your values, talents and who you want to climb alongside. Then you commit to a concrete recurring schedule and simply execute it, independent of how good any single attempt is. The mechanism is that consistency compounds: even if the only thing you care about is the outcome, you reach it faster by committing to a training plan than by constantly grading yourself against an effectively unattainable yardstick. Constant performance assessment is the failure mode; a committed plan is the fix.
Origin
Angner illustrates it with his own abandoned college poetry: he compared each poem to Leonard Cohen's best, judged it inferior, and quit, which he calls 'a sure path to failure.'
Core principles
- 01Measuring yourself against the best in the world guarantees daily failure
- 02Once you commit to a hill, the plan matters more than the scorecard
- 03Consistency compounds even when you only care about the outcome
- 04Constant self-assessment kills the practice before it can pay off
- 05Choosing which hill to climb is a values decision; the climbing is a process decision
How to run it
- 1
Choose your hill
Decide which single skill or pursuit is worth committing to, based on your values, natural talents and who you want to do it with.
Pro tip Climbing in the presence of friends often makes the hill easier to stick with.
- 2
Commit to a concrete schedule
Define a specific recurring practice cadence, such as training every day, rather than an outcome target.
Watch out A vague 'get better' goal offers nothing to show up to; the cadence must be concrete.
- 3
Retire the elite yardstick
Stop comparing each attempt to the best performer you can find; that benchmark is effectively unattainable and only produces daily failure.
Watch out Benchmarking against the best is the exact behaviour that made you quit last time.
- 4
Execute regardless of quality
Show up to the schedule whether today's output is good or bad; keep the plan running independent of your performance judgements.
Pro tip Trust that consistency reaches the outcome even when you only care about the outcome.
In the wild
In college Angner wrote poetry. He would sit down, write a poem, compare it to the best poem of whoever he was reading at the time, Leonard Cohen, decide his was not as good, toss it and stop. He calls this a sure path to failure. To become a poet he would have had to stick with it independently of how good any single poem was, committing to the practice rather than grading each attempt against an unattainable benchmark.
→ The pursuit was abandoned; the lesson is that committing to consistent practice would have carried him toward the goal instead.
Common mistakes
Grading every attempt against the best
Comparing each rep to an elite performer guarantees you fall short daily and abandon the skill before consistency can pay off.
Setting an outcome target with no schedule
Without a concrete recurring cadence there is nothing to show up to, so motivation collapses when results lag.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone starting a hard skill who tends to measure themselves against elite benchmarks.
Not ideal for
Contexts where rapid outcome feedback is genuinely required to correct course.
From the transcript
“you're better off focusing on consistent practice than constantly trying to measure up your performance against some effectively unattainable yardstick”
“we need to select like which hill we're going to climb, right? ... and then just do it”
From the episode
An Economist’s Guide To A Happy Life - Erik Angner - #657
Erik Angner