In John C Maxwell’s book, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, I was moved by the incredibly powerful and yet simple messages he shares.

John spent a good amount of time on the Law of Consistency. I absolutely loved the simple ideas he shared about how he has been able to write more than 75 books. Bringing what he said to the simplest concept, it is this: He is passionate about what he does because he loves what he does and more importantly, he knows why he does it. He also knows that what he does is something much, much larger than himself. In other words, he serves a larger purpose than making a living, writing a book, etc.

The first part of that is his motivation, but in order to actually get it done, or turn it into an accomplishment, requires discipline matched to the motivation. Discipline is a scary word to most people because it sounds an awful lot like drudgery, work, lots of effort, late nights and other such ideas. However, he says the truth is that he just does it every day.

‘Every day? What does that mean?’ people would ask him. His answer, ‘it means, every day.’ Of course, they’re looking for a different answer because to them every day seems like a burden. . . surely he must mean 5 days a week, or every day for just a month or two or something. ‘No,’ he would say, ‘every day means every day.’ ‘Even on Christmas?’ they would add. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘every day.’

So, how does he have more than 75 books published? He writes every day. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘I might only write 10 minutes today, 6 hours tomorrow, I have no set amount, but only to write every day.’ It is the consistency of his actions that add up to the accumulation of the results. John asks, “what are you willing to change doing today in order to change what you will be doing tomorrow?” It’s a great question to consider and answer. He adds, “in the end, hard work is really the accumulation of easy things you didn’t do when you should have.”