Recently I started a new Instagram account and hit ten thousand followers on it. I thought it would take six months, maybe a year. It took me under 45 days.

I started by posting every alternate day. Then one of my reels went viral. After that I started posting twice a day, every single day, without skipping. Even when I was traveling. Even when I had urgent work or home stuff going on. I never skipped a single day.

People keep calling it luck. It is not luck. I got lucky once, the day that reel went viral. Everything after that was just me posting twice a day, every day, for 45 days straight.

Consistency is the king. That is what I keep learning, over and over, in every part of my life.

I once wrote every single day for more than one hundred and twenty days for my blog. I do not remember most of what I wrote. I just remember showing up.

In college I prepared so hard for debates that I became one of the best debaters there. Not because I was naturally good at it. Because I practiced the same arguments again and again until they became automatic.

My weight was around seventy seven kilos. I started doing yoga consistently and brought it down to around sixty four, sixty five kilos. Not through some crash diet. Just by not skipping sessions.

But I have not always been consistent. I have failed at this many times. I tried building a personal brand multiple times and dropped it. I thought about podcasting and never did anything with it. I started writing a book and stopped after one or two chapters. It is still sitting unfinished.

This is not me saying I am a disciplined person. I am not, most of the time. This is me saying the few times I actually showed up every single day, without skipping, are the only times anything actually worked for me. Not hard work in bursts. Not going high for a few days and then dropping off. That never works for me.

Even the greats do this. Virat Kohli was eighteen years old, playing a Ranji Trophy match for Delhi against Karnataka in December 2006. His father died overnight. He came back the next morning and batted, scored ninety runs, helped his team avoid the follow on, and only left for the funeral that evening. Nobody would have blamed him for not showing up. He showed up anyway.

Jiro Ono has run the same sushi restaurant in Tokyo for around six decades. One of his apprentices reportedly had to remake the same egg sushi over two hundred times before Jiro approved it. That is not talent. That is consistency, taken to an extreme.

Cristiano Ronaldo lost his father to alcohol and has barely touched a drink since, decades of discipline, on and off the field.

None of these are stories about talent. They are stories about showing up on the day you had every excuse not to.

Right now I am building Flyn. For the last sixty days I have been consistent, shipping three days a week and marketing it four days a week, aiming for my first $1000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Right now Flyn is at $175 in monthly recurring revenue. Not the number I want. But that is the honest number today, and I would rather write that down than round it up.

Whether it is Sunday or Monday or any other day, I do not stop showing up. That is the whole rule for me.

When Flyn crosses $1000, I will come back and write the next part of this.

Aristotle wrote something I keep coming back to, in the Nicomachean Ethics.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

He was not talking about Instagram or startups. He was talking about how anyone becomes anything. Two thousand years later, it is still true.

People may get lucky. For me, the only thing that has ever actually worked is consistency. Not luck. Not going hard for a few days and then disappearing. That never worked for me.

So I am writing this down. The next time I want to quit something, I do not want to trust my mood. I just want to read this and remember: success was never about luck. It was about the day I did not skip.