It’s only the second week of February and I already broke the consistency streak I set for myself at the beginning of the year. The goal was simple. One YouTube video every single week. And I missed it.

Now normally, this is where the old version of me would spiral. Miss one week, feel guilty, label myself inconsistent, and slowly disappear. But this time something was different. I didn’t quit. And that’s when I realized that most of us completely misunderstand what consistency actually is.

The problem with the word “consistency”

The word consistency comes from the Latin word consistentia, which means “permanence of form”. Read that again. PERMANENCE of form!

Now think about how we use the word today. We say we want to be consistent with the gym, with healthy eating, with investing, with writing, with content creation. But none of those things are permanent in form. Your priorities change, your energy changes, your life changes, your child gets sick, you get sick, plans fall apart, that’s just how life actually is.

So how can you expect permanence in something that exists inside a constantly changing life? It makes no sense.

For years, I struggled with this idea of consistency. If I missed one workout, I felt like I failed, If I skipped one post, I felt like I ruined everything, If I broke the streak, I might as well stop. In my head, consistency meant perfection. And perfection is fragile, the moment life interrupts you, the whole system collapses.

That’s the trap. We set rigid, unshakable rules for a life that is anything but rigid. You can’t control everything, you can’t predict emergencies, you can’t plan for every disruption, yet we build systems that assume life will behave perfectly. It won’t!

What consistency actually is

Consistency is not doing everything perfectly. It’s not missing zero days, It’s not maintaining an unbroken streak. Consistency is simply coming back, that’s it!

This year I missed two weeks of YouTube, but I came back! The old me would have used those two weeks as proof that I “don’t have what it takes”, the new me sees those two weeks as a normal fluctuation in a long term game.

That mindset shift changes everything.

When you’re building alone, everything depends on you. You are the strategist, the writer, the editor, the marketer, the scheduler, the builder…etc. It’s easy to look at high output creators and think, why can’t I keep up? But many of them have teams behind the scenes. Researchers, editors, managers, and most importantly well structured systems. When you’re solo, expecting machine level output is just unrealistic, no mater how ambitious you are no mater how structured you are sooner or later something will happen in your life to throw you out of balance.

That doesn’t mean you need to lower your standards. But it does means you need to set up smarter expectations.

How I fixed it technically

So mindset was the first issue. Now let’s talk about how I fixed my “consistency” from a technical aspect.

In December last year, I started with one simple commitment. Post three times a day on Threads, that was it. No blog, no newsletter, no YouTube. Just one platform and a simple set of daily tasks, post 3 times each day. Because I wanted to focused on mastering that rhythm first.

Once that felt stable, I added one layer at a time.

Today my weekly output looks like this: one blog post, one newsletter, one YouTube video, seven reels, twenty eight X posts, and seven LinkedIn posts. I didn’t jump there overnight. I built it layer by layer until I reached my current time capacity.

Most people fail because they start at the final level instead of level one. They try to operate like a full media company on day one and that pressure is eventually what breaks them. Not their competition not their circumstances not their environment.

Another major shift for me was building a buffer. I have a one year old. My life is unpredictable, so I cannot rely on perfect weeks. So instead of hoping nothing goes wrong, I started preparing for when it does.

When I missed those two weeks of YouTube, I wasn’t disappearing. I was reorganizing, planning and building ahead so that I make sure these hicups will be less and less frequent. The only thing I can do is to designing a system that absorbs chaos instead of collapsing under it.

Life will always throw something at you. And that’s fine that’s just how life is. And your job is not to eliminate chaos is to design around it.

The shift that changed everything

The real difference between last year and this year is not discipline. It’s identity.

Last year, missing a streak meant I was inconsistent. This year, missing a week means nothing. Because I don’t quit anymore.

And that is the real definition of consistency.

Not perfection, not streaks just one clear goal, If I fall I need to get back up again and keep on moving.

If you fall off, come back, if you miss a week, publish the next one, if you skip a workout, train tomorrow.

Consistency is not about never falling. It’s about never staying down.

Forgive yourself faster. Stop listening to people who make life sound like a perfectly optimized machine. It isn’t. Even the people who look flawless are dealing with problems you don’t see. But the difference between between them and us is that they have an entire army behind them to make it look like it is.

If you’re reading this after breaking your own streak, good. That means you’re still in the game.

Now go post the next one.