Estimated read time: 6 minutes

What you’ll learn in this article:

🍵💲 What the 2% club is and what consistency has to do with it

🍵💲 My favorite challenge if you’re serious about creating content, art, whatever you want to call it, on a regular basis

🍵💲 Why not all consistency is created equal and the case for choosing ONE thing

Made it to the 2% club 💪

Apparently only 2% of newsletters make it to 20 issues. 

I don’t know who’s running the tally of every newsletter ever stopped or started but I don’t care because… 

🥁🥁 It’s our 20th Spill the Tea 🥁🥁 & like a true Leo Rising, Enneagram 3, born and bred overachiever, I love any opportunity to be in a top percentile. 

I’m sure there is truth to that stat even if it’s not exactly based on hard data. It applies to many things. 

Most businesses don’t make it past a few years. 

Most podcasts don’t make it past 15 episodes.

Most habits don’t stick. 

The newsletter 2% club isn’t the only one I’m in. 

There’s also a stat that less than 2% of women make it to 7-figures in their business. 

I don’t think the 2 clubs are entirely disconnected. Because the reason behind how I got into both is the same. 

Consistency. 

Which is why it’s the topic for today’s 20th edition of Spill the Tea.

This week’s tea is all about CONSISTENCY

Now listen, before you roll your eyes. Before you assume you know everything I’m about to say! 

Let me tell you how I feel about MOST consistency conversations: 

⇒ Like I’m being served a buffet’s worth of platitudes on a golden platter. Anybody have a chaos cocktail to wash it all down? 

The idea of being consistent is void of any and all novelty in its current non-nuanced form. 

First of all, not all consistency is created equal. 

I consistently checked my email compulsively and that’s not getting me anywhere closer to my goals.

Decide what’s WORTH being consistent in (+ if you even have time for it in your current iteration of life & business)

It’s not enough to swallow the idea that you should be consistent with all the important things you *want* to be consistent in. 

Just start with one thing. 

Michael Jordan mastered basketball before touching a golf club. 

Maria Wendt grew her Facebook group to over 100k business owners before focusing on Instagram. 

Joyce Carol Oates wrote short stories long before she published epic 1,000+ page novels. 

Justin Welsh cracked LinkedIn before becoming a proficient newsletter creator. 

Decide what one thing you want to be consistent in. 

I chose this newsletter because over the years NOTHING has proven to be more fruitful for me than growing and nurturing my email list. 
If you want to become a consistent content creator, one of my favorite practices is Simone Seol’s Garbage Post Challenge.

Set benchmarks — not just around goals but around time

Don’t get so enthralled with expectations that you forget it takes time to get good at something. 

If you set a goal to consistently email your list once a week and generate more sales as a result… 

Don’t just give up if those sales don’t start rolling in right away! 

Give yourself time to get good. I love the aforementioned Garbage Post Challenge because it’s 30 days. It’s tied to time. 

If you start a podcast or newsletter, give yourself that 15-20 episode fair shot.

& When you find what works (and you will), do more of it

But in the meantime, expect to be bored. Expect your delightfully distracted modern mind to tug you in a different more ✨ shiny ✨ new direction. 

Expect to find yourself in a state of utter doubt. 

Is this really what I should focus on? Am I doing it right? 

Remember that we live in a dopamine culture. Consistent, slow growth, is slowly but surely being trained out of us.

 

The thing no one tells you about consistency? It can lead to apathy.

If your only benchmark is to post on LinkedIn once a day, who cares about quality and results? 

Remember that consistency is meaningless if the practice you’re investing your energy in isn’t actually generating the desired results. 

Consistency for consistency’s sake = pointless. 

Speaking of which, I invested in a newsletter audit with Chenell of Growth in Reverse (highly recommend her newsletter if you love behind the scenes breakdowns!) 

Here’s what I learned: 

⇒ I have a lot to learn! Chenell’s report was so detailed. There’s at least 27 things I can improve. I’ll likely devote a whole newsletter to this topic.

Sip on this…  

🧋I’ll never ever think of ellipsis the same way after watching this. 

🧋 These 30 Useful Concepts (including the dopamine nation one I shared earlier) are GOLD. 

🧋On the topic of consistency…