Focus on your Systems, Not Goals

Goals and Systems Simplified

Goals: Your Destination

• Define what you want to achieve.
• Example: "Lose 20 pounds."

Systems: Your Path

• The daily habits that get you to your goal.
• Example: "Daily healthy eating and exercise."

Key Insights:

• Consistency beats intensity: Focus on small, regular actions.
• Enjoy the journey: Process matters more than the end result.
• Be adaptable: Adjust your habits as needed.
• Identity shift: Embrace the behaviors of someone who meets their goals.

Action Steps:

• Break goals into small habits.
• Track your habits.
• Review and adjust regularly.
• Patience is key.

Bottom Line

Goals set the direction; systems ensure progress. Focus on building and maintaining effective systems.

The Power of Systems Over Goals

The Essence of the Principle

• Goals: The targets we aim to hit.
  • Example: "Win a marathon."
• Systems: The day-to-day behaviors and routines that define our progress.
  • Example: "Consistent training schedule and nutrition plan."

Core Insights:

• Achievement mirrors your systems, not your ambitions: Success is less about the goals you set and more about the systems you follow.
• Build robust systems for inevitable success: The strength of your daily practices determines your level of achievement.
• Focus on what you can control: Concentrate on your actions and behaviors, which are within your control, rather than on outcomes, which often aren't.
• Adaptability within systems leads to growth: Systems that allow for feedback and adjustment are more effective in reaching long-term success.

Developing Strong Systems:

• Map out daily and weekly routines that align with your ultimate objectives.
• Implement consistent habits that are directly linked to your areas of focus.
• Regularly review and refine your systems based on outcomes and new insights.
• Embrace an identity that reflects the processes of your systems.

The Fundamental Truth

Your level of success is a reflection of the systems you implement and maintain, not the height of your goals. By focusing on building effective systems, you ensure continuous progress and long-term achievement.

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.

Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so many times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy. I promised myself that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could finally relax. Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.

A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.

Finally, a goal-oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.