Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde

A while back, I wrote a post extolling the virtues of consistency. The idea was that, over the long term, performance ability that regularly and reliably reaches a solid level yields superior results. In particular, it’s better than the ability to achieve exceptional performance sporadically against a general backdrop of mediocre performance. Consistency, in the sense of a deliberate observance of external codes of conduct, has true value as a guiding principle. It decreases the negative effects of chance by eliminating the mistakes that come from spontaneous misjudgements or momentary emotional lapses. There is, however, a darker side of consistency, and it’s related to the consistency of a person across time. In this sense, being consistent is about maintaining internal coherence between your past, present, and future behaviour. The problem is that it can be stifling. It can become just another pretext, another manifestation of fear.

A friend recently sent me a video that animates a poem called “No Leaders Please” by Charles Bukowski. The central theme of this poem is self-reinvention. “[. . .] invent yourself and then reinvent yourself“, Bukowski exhorts us, “reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented.” What struck me was the valorization of re-invention per se, not for any purpose or at any particular occasion. The poem seems to posit that periodic, and perhaps radical, re-invention is good and necessary in and of itself. It should be sought out as a necessary condition of flourishing.

Viewed in this light, consistency becomes a trap. Its imperative for coherence creates the illusion that re-invention can only be undertaken if there is some external change in circumstances to justify it. It seems irrational or unfounded to change course just because. In the interest of being consistent, I have waited for, and in some cases, strained to find some material, objective change to justify doing something differently. In effect, I was a captive of my past through my need to remain consistent with myself. And if there was no objective circumstance to give me license to depart to from the past, then I was out of luck, at least temporarily.

The truth is, though, that you never need a reason to change. You can simply re-invent yourself, or maybe, as Bukowski suggests, negotiate a different acceptance of the status quo based on re-invented terms. Waiting for an external thing is just a way of denying this freedom. In The Courage to be Disliked, Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi, explain that the psychologist Alfred Adler proposed a teleological view of human thoughts and motivation. In Adler’s view, humans are not, as Freud would have it, conditioned by past events. Rather, their present motivations and actions are determined by the goals that they are subconsciously pursuing. Unlike the past, these goals can be changed; indeed, they can be changed arbitrarily. And by changing the goal, whether necessarily, logically, deliberately, or simply arbitrarily, you can change yourself. The impossibility or difficulty of change that deviates from personal history is an illusion. It’s a mental trap born of the fear of freedom, the freedom that you have at any moment, through courage, to re-invent yourself.