"We found in all of our research studies that the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."
-Jim Collins, Great by Choice

In the past decade, I’ve heard an array of credible people – from Freakonomics’ author Stephen Dubner, to CrossFit founder Greg Glassman – all observe that the secret to building a large audience online is a simple trifecta: quality, focus, consistency.  Hit all three, and an audience will follow.

This past weekend, I ended up looking at my traffic logs for this site.  And, on the one hand, given the rather large Google-able library of content I’ve built over fifteen years, there are still waaaay more people who show up here than probably should.  On the other, that’s just a small fraction of the readership this site once had, at my blogging peak.

So, assuming that I’m going to keep blogging, and that I probably want people to read the blog if I do, it might be time for me to consider that quality / focus / consistency trifecta.

As for quality: well, this is pretty much how I write.  Sure, I can spend more time editing and re-writing before posting, can focus on mixing more of the highly-considered longform pieces in with the hopefully-interesting-yet-still-brief pops.  But this site always has been and always will be my outboard brain: a place where I scribble down ideas, observations, stories, and reflections in the kinds of long, convoluted sentences that give the Hemingway Editor conniption fits. What you already see, in other words, is what you’re going to get.

Focus, though; that one’s a choice. Indeed, I regularly hear from people who are interested in just one of the many topics I’ve posted about regularly in the past – whether fitness, tech, productivity, or drunken misadventure – and wish I’d scrap the rest in favor of more about the single topic they find interesting. But, again, this site is first and foremost my outboard brain. And since my actual brain is full of all those topics and countless more, I’m just not that interested in winnowing down, regardless of whether doing so would be a smart content marketing strategy.

So onto consistency! That’s one where I’m both totally shitting the bed at the moment, and also know I could be doing better. For many years, I managed to blog more or less daily. And, not surprisingly, that’s also when this site had a far more substantial and engaged following. In the past year, however, my blogging has been entirely feast and famine – short stretches when I get back to it with alacrity, followed by a fall off the blogging wagon that leads to long stretches of radio silence.

Funny enough, that’s the same pattern I also see in people following and then falling off of diets. So, perhaps, the same prescription applies:

First, start thinking about a day (or three) of misses as inevitable aspects of growth rather than as signs of absolute failure. Based on past experience, I’m sure I’m going to fail at blogging for days at a time. That feels less like ‘game over’ if I’m already expecting it to be part of the process.

Second, especially when coming back from a derail, stop making the perfect the enemy of the good. When people are working on nutrition, they’ll often eat a single less-than-perfect meal (say a couple of slices of birthday cake at work on Thursday) and turn that into an excuse to binge on Ben & Jerry’s all weekend until they can ‘start fresh’ the following Monday. I’ve totally been guilty of that here, with a short absence turning into an ever longer one as I start to think I need to write a crazy long post (like this one, apparently) just to justify the disappearance and return.

Which then leads to a third and final point: the solution to perfectionism is a celebration of incremental gains. Something is better than nothing. Which means, in nutrition, a willingness to pat yourself on the back if today’s eating was even just slightly better than yesterday’s. And, in blogging, probably means I should be putting up more short, shitty posts if that’s what it takes to keep blogging on the (somewhat) daily. Apparently, look for more those to come!