Feb 15, 2024
On the coffee table in our living room sits a copy of The Ashley Book of Knots. Written by Clifford W. Ashley in 1944, it documents 3,854 knots, explaining their purpose, their origin, and how to tie them, with accompanying hand-drawn illustrations for each knot. The book is so widely known and referenced by knot tyers that even modern sources on knot-tying, such as AnimatedKnots.com, will often refer to knots by their number in the book, such as ABOK #1402 for the Square Knot.
In the introduction to the book, Ashley explains how the book came about. He recounts learning the aforementioned Square Knot at age three from one of his uncles, and, at seven, learning a Halter Hitch to secure to a post a pony which his father gave him. Later, he worked aboard a whaling ship and an oysterman (a vessel for dredging oysters), where he learned sailors’ knots. While on the oysterman, he saw what he thought was a new knot and attempted to replicate it, only to find that he had in fact created a knot of his own—a knot now called the Oysterman’s Stopper or Ashley’s Stopper Knot.
He continued nurturing this fascination with knots for the next forty years:
From that day I have continued in my spare time, and also in time that perhaps I should not have spared, to search for new things in knots, in sinnets, and in splices. Occasionally I have set the subject aside for a while, but always to pick it up again sooner or later. (p. 7)
The last eleven of those forty years were spent writing the book that has carried his name and work into the modern age. He did not work consistently at this exploration—he says he “set the subject aside for a while” at times—but he did work persistently. He “always [picked] it up again sooner or later.”
This idea—persistence—is the foundation of meaningful achievement and an application of agency thinking: we intentionally seek pathways towards a goal. Our modern culture often focuses myopically on consistency instead. Understanding the difference and cultivating persistence in ourselves enables us—like Ashley—to make a long-lasting impact on the world.
I once knew a man who struggled to overcome alcoholism. Being an analytically-minded person, he kept a spreadsheet of important values and trends in his life.
One cell in that spreadsheet contained the number of days he had been sober. That single cell, rather than motivating him forward, crushed him. He would get a dozen, fifty, one hundred days!—and then it would come slamming back down to zero because of one bad night. I saw him slowly lose the will to try again. His focus on consistency tyrannically oppressed him, squeezing the persistence out of him like juice from a lime.
The cruelty of it was that it was a lie. One mess-up after 100 days of success doesn’t somehow evaporate those successful days! That’s still incredible progress. But reducing his success to that one fragile number occluded that.
Emphasizing consistency over persistence, especially by measuring streaks, is an example of Goodhart’s Law:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
How consistent you are at a given thing—how many days you’ve done it in a row—is not an end in itself. It’s a measure, a rough proxy for how persistent you are. And, in cases like my friend’s, it hides persistence’s most valuable trait—tenacity. Trying again. Having to try again is deemed a failure rather than an opportunity for new victory.
This leads me to the second pitfall of consistency: it’s about sameness, when persistence is about adaptation.
Consistency is about rendering something checkable. “Do the thing.” Check. ☑️ “Do the thing again.” Check. ☑️
The big and important things in life, however, are not checkable, and neither are the steps you take to accomplish them. These things involve getting creative and curious, adjusting as you go, and trying new approaches when what used to work doesn’t anymore. As such, a persistent path towards a goal can actually look highly inconsistent. As Paul Graham says in “How to Do Great Work”:
An ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.
To accomplish great work, you need to be flexible and adaptive. You have to approach each obstacle with curiosity and intent, finding different pathways around each one.
The need for creative persistence can be seen clearly in parenting. Becoming a new parent a month ago has made it clear to me how little consistency is really involved, and how critical persistence is. This is particularly true in the newborn stage—what works to meet their needs one week might not work the next—but it can be seen in later stages too. When I was growing up, my parents helped me work through each new challenge as it came: needing glasses, an ADHD diagnosis, needing jaw surgery, etc. They adapted along the way, and I felt their love for and belief in me through their persistent and patient help.
Understanding this has been reassuring to me as a new dad. A few months back, I had a conversation with my therapist in which I expressed my fear that I would, due to my ADHD, fail to be mentally present with my daughter. He challenged me to think not about how I would avoid failing, but about how I would recover from failure.
He then pointed out something that I thought was very profound: Persistently recovering well from my failures will likely have a greater positive effect on my daughter than being perfectly attentive would. She doesn’t need me to model perfection for her. She needs me to model humility, growth, compassion towards self and others, forgiveness-seeking, and agency thinking—a mindset of finding ways to do better next time.
In my profession of software engineering, there’s a second meaning to the word “persistence”: it means longevity, such as in the phrase “persistent storage,” which refers to data being stored on disk, like in a file on your computer. It’s often contrasted with the word “ephemeral,” used for short-lived data, such as text in an input field that disappears when you refresh the page.
I find this interesting—persistence is connected to durability, to long-lasting-ness.
Parenting, again, is a good example of this. Persistently being a present and mindful father will have a long-lasting impact on my daughter. The rest of her life will be built on the foundation that my parenting sets for her—whether I am intentional about it or not. But only by choosing to be intentional—choosing persistence—can I make that foundation strong, secure, and happy.
Careers, especially the nebulous “great work” kind of careers discussed by Paul Graham in the essay quoted previously, are also examples of persistence leading to lasting impact. Charles Goodyear, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Marie Curie and many others had no clear “consistent” path to their goals. There were no checkable, recurring steps they could take—by nature of their work, they had to forge their own paths.
Perhaps most notably, any visionary who strove to change the system they lived in—from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Bassel Khartabil—has had to persist in the pursuit of their vision, finding new paths when old ones were closed by the status quo’s self-preserving nature.
Visionaries, impactful individuals, and parents have something in common: their work outlasts them, in a way that those who come after them will continue building on. I think that’s the essence of lasting impact—placing pieces of a puzzle that, though incomplete, is left further along than it was before for you having lived.
I have a confession: I’ve done a bit of deceptive hand-waving here, for rhetorical purposes. Consistency and persistence aren’t diametrically opposed. In reality, they are a both-and proposition, as Ross Ellenhorn would call it—you need both consistency and persistence to achieve any meaningful goal. As a parent, I need to be consistent in meeting Bella’s physical needs or she could develop serious physical and psychological health challenges. In a meaningful career, showing up for the small things consistently—like self-directed learning—can make a huge difference.
Even in this project, I have used both consistency and persistence. Writing the Innerhelm newsletter has been something I’ve tried to do consistently each week. But I needed persistence after taking a two-week break after my daughter was born, and when I worried that I wouldn’t be able to write meaningfully each week. Furthermore, becuase a blog isn’t my end goal—I don’t know the end goal, since this is an exploratory project—I need persistence to explore potential pathways and opportunities.
However, as I explained above, focusing on consistency too narrowly can evoke discouragement and suppress creativity. It can lead to a kind of tunnel-vision where we only see simple, measurable, recurring things and overlook the creative, open-ended thinking that true tenacity requires.
Consistency alone won’t get you where you want to be, because there are no perfectly-straight pathways there. Persistence is crucial. A personal emphasis on persistence can empower you to see obstacles as part of your journey, rather than an interruption in the journey. The overcoming of those unique obstacles is what makes life meaningful.
And who knows? Maybe, forty years down the road, your persistent effort will lead you to write a book—or to do some other work—that people will still reference a century from now. 🪢
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