This is original content by Andriy Buday.

Inspiration doesn’t last

One of my observations both in myself and in others is that being consistent is hard, especially in starting something new or in high effort activities. Think about when you get inspired to go to the gym every other day only to discover it is hard to find time, or think about when people talk about yet another self-help book that promises success if you just follow some simple morning ritual and “x rules of success” only to realize following those rules is unrealistic, or think about someone who fell in love and puts effort into looking and behaving exemplary only to revert to the baseline after some time.

Arguably, it is in human nature to have waves of inspiration, attempting something, and abandoning it if it doesn’t pay off instantly or after it has paid off. Lack of time, competing priorities, procrastination, laziness, waiting for a better time, just not feeling like it.

In this post I would like to document for myself and to share some of the instances of things that worked for me and didn’t work for me. I will try to analyze my own behavior to see if any of this can be generalized and if there is a way to figure out a way to make things work.

Consistency fading away

Let’s start with some scenarios where I had success but then consistency faded away in a very long run:

• Consistent blog post writing
  • I have 328 blog posts over here. The majority of posts are old ones from 2010-2013 with a monthly average of 5-10 posts.
  • Inspiration: blogging was popular around 2010 (no gen AI, no insta, not much of twitter) and it paid off in terms of people getting to know me, building connections. I would have not done well in my career without this blog.
  • Reason for less blogging? I no longer feel that the benefits justify effort, anyone can use Gen AI to create a blog post a lot better than this one diminishing my enthusiasm, no one really reads posts these days, internet is just over-saturated. And frankly “I got tired” as was put by one of my early role model, Scott Hanselman, after 20 years of blogging.
  • Conclusion: blogging helped me in the past; it can be useful even now to organize my thoughts in an environment outside of work, but does it pay off?
• Reading books
  • I don’t know the number of books I read, but I had multiple annual goals of reading, say 24 books a year, 6 tech books, or 13 investment books, etc. and I succeeded in many of those annual goals or had partial success (hard to do a book every 2 weeks).
  • Inspiration: eagerness to apply knowledge to advance in life, bright eyes thinking that books have all the answers, falsely thinking that book authors are another breed.
  • So I don’t read books now? Well, I do, but a lot less. Over time to me many books became repetitive and boring, especially, if they are on the same topic (say, productivity) plus it becomes annoying to spend time listening to non-original content and authors citing all the same research over and over. Another issue I have is that I don’t have a proper mechanism for remembering things, so often it is wasted time. You read a book and a week later you have a hard time recalling what was there.
  • Conclusion: no doubt reading books is beneficial, everyone should do it, but is it so hard to continue to find inspiration, time, and satisfaction in reading them.

Cyclic consistency

Now let’s look at some of the cyclic scenarios when I returned to the old consistency for some periods of time:

• Interview prep
  • Arguably one would say that everybody prepares for interviews when they change jobs, but I went through a few instances when I was preparing for half a year or so without any interviews lined up or even thoughts of changing jobs. Yeah, just doing some 5-10 leetcode every week for fun.
  • Motivation: sense of importance of advance preparation and always being ready, but also I just like coding a tiny bit of something and feeling completeness.
  • Conclusion: cyclic approach worked great for me in the past, but after multiple months it becomes less fun I start to question my sanity.
• Waking up in the morning
  • I’m likely an evening person (if there is such a thing). I had many periods of being an early morning person. You know “new you” waking at a crazy morning, “deep work”, and all of that, but it doesn’t always work like that, very often I feel like a zombie and after multiple “zombie” periods I gave up on the morning thing. Ironically, I started this blog post 6:30AM and am almost done by 9AM.
  • Inspiration: there is like a barrage of books, articles, gurus, whatever telling that if you claim morning to yourself you will have done more till noon than most people in a week. Lol, I wish that was true.
  • This one is painful. I had so many failures after attempting this that. Something that also bothers me is that I was extremely productive at some of my previous jobs when I would come to the office like 11:30AM after barely waking at 10:30AM but then would work till very late.

Consistency on the raise

And now I want to examine two cases where I consistently improve consistency if that makes sense.

• Physical exercises
  • One of the things I did not pay attention to in childhood and early adulthood was health and physical exercising. I was healthy for the most part, I didn’t care how I looked. In 2016 I started having periods of running, then I discovered rock climbing, and in 2021 I went nuts and worked out 365 days, including 148 rock climbing gym visits (my climbing stuff), 78 runs, 87 hours of weight training, and many other activities.
  • Inspiration: this came naturally, originally motivation was establishing challenges with friends, later I found it could be fun to beat personal records and socialize in a bouldering gym, a also noticed how it helped dealing with mental stress and my back pains are gone.
  • Conclusion: consistent payoff and little downside made this ever more consistent activity. I might not hit 366 days this year, but will be very close to it.
• Financial goals
  • As a disclaimer, I work for FAANG company but I work in Canada and started fairly late, so I’m not one of those multi-million net worth guys advising on life. Instead, while making regular (still high) software engineer money in Europe, I’ve been very consistent and deliberate in management of money. I have a custom spreadsheet I update every month since 2012. I read multiple books, tried a bit of more active trading and switched to super-simple strategies. All-in-all just grinding a consistent approach to money. Not that I didn’t make mistakes, purely from financial perspective I should have moved to the US, I bought a townhouse in Vancouver at the worst time possible and some other mistakes.
  • Inspiration: I guess sense of security and thoughts about the future are a great driving factor, but a lot of actual inspiration came from reading popular financial books, like those about Warren Buffett.

Conclusion

It is great to get inspired and I recommend deliberately looking for sources of inspiration: read books, look for mentors, create plans for yourself. With that having said, inspiration lacks durability and this is where work to build and maintain habits starts, it is hard and often results in failure. In my experience, starting something and then failing is OK as long as you start the cycle again and again, pushing the time of a failure further and further away in any given cycle. It is critical to ensure that your cycles are the right ones (another topic), but eventually your cycles will connect into one uninterrupted wavy line that takes you to your goals. Don’t give up!