I write every day. Words flow from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard to my screen, tallying somewhere in the 1-5k range, depending on what I’m working on.

That’s a fair number of words! Not all of them are good. Many will end up reworked, replaced, or removed, but still; in terms of just raw words-to-page? I’m happy with that metric.

The real value in that kind of practice is not accrued on any individual day, though—it’s what happens over time.

Write a thousand (or five-thousand) words once, and it’s likely most of those words won’t be worth much. Write a thousand or more words every day, and they’ll tend to get better, your process of honing those words will become more refined, and you can maybe someday make a career out of word-typing.

Going to the gym is similar. Any exercise can be valuable, but if you go to the gym only periodically, maybe once a month, you’ll enjoy some general “I moved my body today” benefits, which isn’t nothing. But in addition to almost certainly being sore and probably not doing your chosen exercises terribly well (due to a lack of familiarity), if you just go once or every once in a long while, you also won’t enjoy anywhere near the benefits you’d see if you went several times a week.

I run a little reading group here in Milwaukee, and early on I decided that I would show up at the coffee shop where it’s held every Sunday and read for an hour, no matter what. For the first several months it was just me, my book, and my drink. After a while, though, people started showing up, and now a consistent 5-15 people join me to read and talk books every Sunday.

I decided to keep showing up even when I was pretty sure no one else would attend because I realized that a lot of the meetups I’d seen come and go over the years fizzled due to a lack of consistency, which in turn led to a lack of perceived stability. No one wants to put in the effort to go to a meetup only to be the only person there, so if I could do that work, take that risk, no one else would ever have to. At least one other person (me) would be there every single time, and that helped this little group to find its feet.

One-off efforts can absolutely have value, but consistent habits, practices, and routines can bear even more lucrative fruit, transforming something good into a radically more potent version of the same.

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