Almost every piece of business advice I read for the first fifteen years of my career said some version of the same thing: be consistent. I tried, repeatedly, and repeatedly failed to sustain it for more than a few weeks.
It took getting diagnosed with ADHD at 47 and autism at 49 to understand what was actually happening: consistency advice assumes a relatively stable baseline of energy from day to day. My baseline was never stable.
Rather than keep failing at consistency, I rebuilt my business around variability instead: buffers in project timelines, work batched in advance during high-capacity days, and clear client expectations that output would be excellent but not perfectly evenly paced.
If you’ve spent years failing at consistency and quietly blaming yourself, consider that the advice might be built for a different kind of brain than yours.