A Letter from Chris Suarez
CONSISTENCY OVER INTENSITY
We all have a propensity for intensity.
We like giving it our all. We love bursts of energy. We love the feeling of accomplishment at the end of that 12 hour day. We feel like we left it all on the field after that all-nighter. It makes us feel like we moved the needle. It makes us feel like we made progress and gained a competitive edge.
We like thinking that we can accomplish everything in these bursts. We block off a week to get away from work and take the family on vacation. We disconnect and get to the beach, or the mountain, or the city, or Disney. We go all in.
But legacy businesses aren’t built on all-nighters and 12-hour days and bursts of sales calls.
Jeff Bezos started working on Amazon in 1994 and the site went live a year later on July 16th, 1995. A “short” twenty eight years later the company has had one of the largest impacts on the world that any company ever has.
Elon Musk started his first software company in 1995. He has continued to learn and invent for just a “short” twenty seven years while creating companies that literally change our lives and the world in which we live.
Mark Zuckerberg launched what is today’s Meta in October of 2003. In a “short” 20 years he has created a company that changed how humans interact and behave.
Relationships aren’t built on week-long vacations. They are built over years of day in and day out connection and conversation. Families are built by being there consistently when they need us, and when they don’t. We can easily prove to our kids that they are important to us when we fly in for the game and fly out a few hours later to get to a work meeting. But that doesn’t build a real relationship with them. Real relationships are built by consistently being present and engaged. By consistently eating meals with them. By consistently talking with them. By consistently being there. A few weeks or months of intense therapy isn’t going to fix your real problem - your lack of consistency.
An intense family vacation doesn’t guarantee a successful family dynamic any more than an intense few weeks of commitment at the office doesn’t guarantee a legacy business. Both business and relationships can reap some benefit by those bursts of intensity. They are filled with energy and passion and focus and commitment.
But success is defined by consistency.
Are you hiring? Look for a track record of consistency.
Are you wondering if someone is going to make it? Look at their calendar for consistency.
Are you wondering if you are the right leader? Openly take an accounting of your consistency.
Creating anything worth anything demands consistency. A business worth anything. A product worth anything. A partnership worth anything. A marriage worth anything. A parent-child relationship worth anything.
Take a lesson from MY dog, Winston. Yes, I call him my dog. I love that dog more than any dog I’ve ever had. I play with him more than anyone else in the house. I hike with him the most. I run with him the most. But he consistently is fed by my wife. He consistently sleeps with my daughter. They both consistently are with him more hours of each day than I am… and so, if you asked HIM, he might be THEIR dog. By sheer consistency, they have created a different kind of bond with him than I have created with him - based on intensity.
We have read a few too many stories of overnight success - founders and creators pulling all-nighters for a couple years straight, eating ramen in the living room of their apartment, working intensely for weeks on end with their college buddies, sleeping a few hours in their broken down office space or garage before returning to coding, making literally hundreds of sales calls every day for a year before getting that yes. Those stories are fun to listen to, but they aren’t the whole story. The rest isn’t shared, or we just stopped listening. Because that’s when the real hard work begins. It’s the day in and day out consistency.
We have watched one too many romantic comedies where Jennifer Lopez falls madly in love with someone she just met while cleaning his hotel room and they live happily ever after. Or the girl next door runs into Matthew McConaughey at the neighbourhood bar, they have a beer, and live happily ever after. What we don’t see is the day-in and day-out consistency of getting through disagreements, consistently picking up after one another, and consistently hashing out parenting decisions.
Success comes from consistency. Not intensity.
I guess that means we just need to be intensely consistent.
Chris