Consistency & Stability #magick #adulting101 #amwriting

As with all things in life, consistency is one of the main ingredients to success. You have to show up, do the work, and do it with consistency. Far too often I meet magicians who want a quick fix (usually magickal success in any endeavor), or skills, or even a following or readership (for the occult authors out there) with none of the work. I meet writers who want to write one book and expect to sell tens of thousands of copies the second it’s published. This is not how anything in life works. Inconsistency doesn’t work in the workplace, it doesn’t work with developing skills (of any sort), and it certainly doesn’t work if you’re looking to be successful — at ANYTHING.

So if you want to be a good magician, do the work! (See Andrieh Vitimus’ domagick.com for help here.) If you want to learn divination, practice every day. If you want to make the best widgets in the world – build the widgets, test them, redesign as necessary, and build more. If you want to be a writer – write, revise, and write some more. Even those born with a natural affinity for something still need to practice and hone their skills before they become really good at anything. The same goes for the workplace. If you want a promotion, or to be the best [insert job title here], you have to show up and do the work. You need to show people you are willing to put forth the effort that shows them that you are serious about your goals, serious about learning, and serious about becoming the expert you want to be. No one just wakes up one day and says, “I want THIS SUCCESS” and has it within 24 hours.

You also need to continue being consistent even after the big setbacks and failures. If your first book bombs, you have to keep going with the next one, and the one after that. The first novel I wrote that was successful wasn’t the first published one. It wasn’t the second, and it wasn’t the third. It was actually the fifth or sixth published novel – I’d have to count again. (I’m not counting unpublished novels here, so if we add those, we’re talking at least eleven novels total before a successful one.)  Despite the failures – I kept going. Consistency means keeping at it through all of this and not falling into a deep depression that causes you to quit. So maybe in a year your divination skills aren’t like something out of a television show. But that doesn’t mean a year of work is wasted, or that you failed. It just means you need to work some more.  Instant gratification is a rarity when it comes to success.

I bring up stability because I often see people who want to write the occult books or become the expert in a certain area of magickal work, but they are unstable. I don’t mean psychologically (though that is sometimes the case), but rather they can’t seem to keep the same FB name or page, or even the same religious/spiritual paradigm, for more than a week or two at a time. They constantly delete and re-create new accounts over and over again. They are constantly reinventing themselves because they don’t know who they are,  they’re not comfortable with themselves, or they’re unhappy with their lack of a following. Or they’ve done something stupid (like attracted trolls, shown their ignorance of something, or said something ridiculous) and want to hide from that failure. Look – we all fuck up and make asses of ourselves. I’ve said and done stupid shit, too. Just own it, apologize or admit you were wrong if necessary, and move on. Be authentic, own your mistakes (and learn from them), and suck it up. Be stable and consistent.

In instances where you want people to know who you are, and you want to be considered an authority – consistency and stability go hand-in-hand. The more consistent you are – the more stability you have – the more people are willing to listen to your ideas. If you show up out of the blue and have only been practicing magick for a few months, then you write a book as if you were an expert, you can’t really expect to draw the same sizable readership as an author who has been practicing magick for decades.  We all started out small and unknown.  Then slowly – we built our supporters, professional contacts, readers, etc… over years and years of consistent work.

I wish all of you the greatest success in your endeavors, and hope this article inspires you to do the work and put yourself out there — consistently! Do it for one year and see how far you get. I suspect the results may surprise you!