How Ichiro Believed in the Power of Consistency to Achieve the Greatest Baseball Records

Who is Ichiro Suzuki?

Ichiro Suzuki is a great Japanese professional baseball player who played in Japanese baseball league from 1992 to 2000 and in major league baseball from 2001 to 2012. He holds a record in MLB of 262 hits in a single-season which is the best record in MLB history. He also achieved over 200 hits in a season for 10 consecutive seasons.

To achieve great records, Ichiro should be such a talented baseball player. He is certainly a great talented baseball player but he is also famous for sticking to his routine. He was the person who stuck to the basics and valued continuing to do the same routine. How he stuck to his routine is not only in the baseball field but also in his daily life. It is famous that he only ate curry for his brunch everyday before the game. Not only what he ate, his sleeping time and waking time was consistent.

In this article, sports psychologist, Mitsuo Kodama (児玉光雄) describes about Ichiro’s attitude as below.

From the past years, Ichiro valued more on how he prepared rather than the game itself. All the time, he believed that the key to achieve great results is to accomplish completely on what he decided to do. And, continuously pursued to do so.

(イチロー選手は昔から本番の試合よりも、それまでにいかに準備したかということを大事にしています。終始一貫、自分の決めたことをきっちりとこなすことが成果を出すカギであると信じてやり続けたのです)

How Ichiro believed in consistency

Ichiro was a player who always valued the basics and valued doing the basics again and again. This is because he believed strongly in consistency. Ichiro described that doing ordinary things is the key to doing special things as below. (Source: https://iyashitour.com/archives/19139)

Not to do special things to achieve special things, but to do normal things as ordinary to do special things.

(特別なことをするために特別なことをするのではない、特別なことをするために普段どおりの当たり前のことをする。)

He also described that the team doesn’t need to have a super play to win but need to be consistent on the play.

It is rare that amazing super play will lead to winning. I think the team which can do the necessary play precisely is strong.

(びっくりするような好プレイが、勝ちに結びつくことは少ないです。確実にこなさないといけないプレイを確実にこなせるチームは強いと思います。)

Although Ichiro has the record of 262 hits in a season, I believe making the record was not his objective. I believe he just focused on making hits as much as possible and the record just came after. Since his intention was to have as many hits as possible, I believe that led to a record of producing more than 200 hits per season for 10 consecutive seasons.

What we can learn from Ichiro’s belief is that to be special, we don’t need to have special ability but need to be consistent in doing it. Even if an action might not be special, consistency will make the result special.

Do we value consistency?

When we look back to ourselves, as people pursuing business, we all have a goal to achieve. But if the goal is to achieve more than 250 hits in a season, we may need to question ourselves whether there are more important goals to focus on where we can achieve consistently. If a person is doing sales, in many cases, the goal would become the number such as sales amount or number of clients acquired. Of course having those numbers is important to have the same understanding on how much the team is aiming to achieve. But, only having that goal will not promise to achieve a goal unless there are consistent actions to pursue.

If we would like to be like Ichiro, I believe that rather than focusing on the goal number, it is important to focus on what the person needs to do consistently. For a sales person, in order to sell a product, there should be a necessary routine to do. Those routines might be actions such as making follow up calls. If the action is relevant enough to achieve goal number, the person should focus on pursuing those actions consistently. By doing those actions consistently, I believe that person will become special and talented like Ichiro. And if there are teams in which every member can do those necessary routines consistently, the team will become strong and eventually be consistent in achieving goals.

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