What You Can Achieve In a Year

February 15, 2019 2 min read

Jon Edmiston, one of my mentors and friends, has a phrase he frequently likes to use: “People overestimate what they can achieve in a day, but underestimate what they can achieve in a year1. Like many of his sayings, it’s one that’s been repeated to me a lot but until recently I hadn’t really reflected on it what it actually means.

Whilst the specifics of the phrase itself are immaterial I think it captures the reality that consistency achieves more than pure effort. Today I found an illustrative example of this doing some digital housecleaning. I manage my collection of RSS feeds using Feedbin and whilst I started with the intention of keeping an orderly collection of feeds over time their organisation has tended toward chaotic. I spent some time today to organise and curate the set of blogs I follow and as I did I noticed that a large percentage of the blogs I follow had ceased to be active some time ago and another large proportion of them only had a handful of posts each year.

It was a sobering realisation but it reflects the difficulty of investing effort over a long period of time. My own blog, has certainly had periods of inactivity but by continuing to intentionally write as regularly as I can, I hope to reap the rewards of discipline and consistency elsewhere in my life.


  1. Or something like that, I’m paraphrasing. ↩︎

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Last Updated: 2019-02-18 12:08