Mediocrity Is The Sign Of Chronic Inconsistency [for irunurun]

In 2010, I came across the wonderful tool irunurun. It was a powerful tool to help me ensure I completed the things that moved my life and work forward each week. Over the years, I struggled to maintain consistency, but the timing of my personal development, and this tool was a perfect storm for helping me achieve the success I was seeking.

How I found irunurun and used it to elevate myself towards consistency

My goal is to give you an understanding of why irunurun has had so much impact on my life and my business.

I have only been using it for 9 months, but there has been more transformation in my world in the last 9 months than the first 6 years of business.  I have come to realize that IRUNURUN is not the plan to succeed. It’s the part of the plan your working on right now.

My story starts over 2 years ago.  I was looking for IRUNURUN, but I didn’t know it.  I just knew that consistency was a big problem for me. I was great in my interactions with people, but I would always fall off at some point because of my weaknesses. I realized I was not consistent, and I did not follow through well.

This impacted my relationship with God, my marriage, and my business. I became reactionary with everything because I was never consistently being proactive. Since my strength was being adaptable and reactive, I was able to repair and reconcile these three big rocks in my life, but over time this stopped working.

So, I had to find a way to be consistent.  I identified two major problems. The first was writing down my activities, and the second was being held accountable for those activities. At that point I created a spreadsheet with seven things I needed to do each week. Some were items I had to do every day.  I separated them into 3 categories: faith, family, and work.

Here were the items I had under FAITH:

• “Read The Bible Daily, M’Cheyne One Year Reading Plan” (7 times per week)
• Attend Church Weekly
• Attend Men’s group Bi-Weekly
• Actively listen to Christian, leadership and personal development podcasts

• Spend time with Caitlyn & Madison daily. If I am out at night, spend time during the day. (7 times per week)

• Keep Saturday as a sabbath
• Daily, ask myself, “Is my motivation growing the kingdom, God?”

I put all this time into this great spreadsheet, but it only lasted 4 weeks!  In IRUNURUN terms, it became a “zero” for a long time after that.

I believe there were two major problems I faced that kept it from working. First, I lacked the discipline to do this system. I wanted it, but I didn’t want it enough to keep doing it.  Second, the accountability team members I selected were not holding me accountable.

Without keeping myself accountable and without others keeping me accountable it was destined to fail. Now with that being said, I still made an effort to do the things in the list, but the issue of inconsistency resurfaced.

While on this 4-week journey, I shared it with a friend of mine, and he mentioned a company, IRUNURUN, that was working on a tool to do exactly what I was doing. The problem was that the site wasn’t live yet, so I had to use my spreadsheet in the meantime. Since I never looked into it or followed up – remember, that's my weakness :-) – I forgot all about it, at least for a while.

So for a while I fell off the wagon.  Inconsistency continued to be my biggest problem. I kept trying to use different tools, programs and devices to “fix me”, but I was never able to cure the bug of my weaknesses.

Fast forward almost a year, I ended up talking with a client.  In learning about their business, they mentioned they were using IRUNURUN with their clients. I immediately went and signed up for an account. I then reached back out to the same friend I had talked to the year before, and it all came back to me. This was the company he had mentioned!

I knew consistency was my weakness. I needed a tool to help me manage that weakness, and I needed to understand I am unable to “fix” my weaknesses. I started my account primarily focusing on personal activities.  I recognized that I needed to start small and work my way up. With this in mind, I added an item or two, mastered it, and then added more. The idea was to master and then grow. I had been too focused before on growing and then mastering.

Around this time I went to a large leadership conference called Catalyst, and at the event I heard Jim Collins speak.  Jim spoke about his book, Great by Choice, and his study of successful leaders versus unsuccessful leaders. During his talk he made the following comment “mediocrity is the sign of chronic inconsistency!”. That one hit me right in the forehead like a 2×4. I immediately thought of IRUNURUN.

Shortly after this point I decided to start a second account of IRUNURUN to use for my business activities. In this case I set the business at full throttle. Instead of starting with one action and mastering it before I added another, I added all the items I knew I was supposed to be doing.

What I was essentially doing was running a marathon without any training. As you can probably guess, I failed for a while.  But after a few months, I caught my breath and starting consistently getting high scores. The result? In Q1 of 2012 we grew 25% from the prior year. The consistent activity made an impact.

After using both a personal and business account and consistently getting high scores, I finally decided to combine the two accounts into one account to increase focus. I had used the tool as a correction device, a chiropractor and it eventually corrected my “activity back”. If I wanted to modify an existing behavior or habit, develop a new one, or stop one, I used IRUNURUN to help do that.

A friend once told me, your life can really only be about 1 or 2 things, decide which 1 or 2 things it is going to be. Looking back at my experience with IRUNURUN, I initially was searching for a superficial answer to my problems, a silver bullet if you will, but what I really needed was a life foundation change. I had to anchor my life on a rock, on a foundation, and only then did I realize how powerful this tool could be for me.

I continue to use the tool and recommend it at every turn I can because of how it impacted me. Results vary, but one thing is for sure, this tool will surface a lot of insights about yourself and circumstances and can give visibility to the very daily activities you do.

Photo by Nick Tiemeyer on Unsplash