Have you ever found yourself disappointed in the lack of progress you’ve made towards a goal that you wrote down over a year ago – maybe it was 2, 5 or even 10 years ago?
Someone told you that writing down your goals would make it more likely to accomplish the goal. So you did it, only to find the piece of paper years later – with your goals still unaccomplished.
While it’s true that we need to write down our goals to have a better chance of achieving them, there’s more to it than that. Unfortunately, there’s no magic ink or paper that will bring us the improved life that we desire.
But luckily, we can improve our chances of success by differentiating between goals and systems.
What are goals?
When we boil down goals, they are really just desires. They are something that we want to achieve in life.
Don’t get me wrong. Goals can be great motivational tools. I’m a big fan of personal development, which really revolves around setting and achieving new goals.
The problem with focusing on goals is that they’re easy to come up with. That’s why it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing all our energy on constantly coming up with new goals. This results in an infinite list of things we’d like to accomplish in our lives. And while our list of desires grows longer, we don’t actually get that much closer to achieving any of them.
When we focus on goals, we set a milestone for an undefined time in the future. Too often, we go about our lives just as we had before we came up with the goal. When we don’t clarify the actions, we never understand what we need to change to reach this new goal.
In result, we probably never reach the goal. Instead, we stumble across the goal written down years later and respond with a sigh and an exasperated “Oh yeah…”.
My point here is that goals are useless without the planning phase behind them. If we never plan out how we’ll reach our goals, we will most likely never achieve them.
What are systems?
That’s where systems come in. Systems are like bridges to the future. They provide a roadmap of small actions we can take everyday to eventually reach our goal.
We build systems on top of our goals to clarify the actions we need to take. By focusing on our most important goals, we can make them achievable with a simple planning phase. We systematise the actions that will help us reach our goals into habits, processes and workflows.
The system provides a framework for repeated actions that help us inch towards our goal. We don’t expect a quick-fix solution, but we are patient and continue to develop everyday. Everyday we follow our system, we develop our skills and character, while we progress with our goals.
When we have a clear system that we’ve written down, we can allow ourselves to focus completely on the task at hand. There’s no second-doubting yourself when you plan in advance what you should be doing. You allow yourself to focus entirely on what matters – following the Getting Things Done methodology.
This is where deliberate practice comes in. We’re motivated by our goals, and we know what we should be doing to achieve them. Everyday we work towards our goals, we become better at the tasks we need to succeed.
In other words, systems are what we can control – the lead measure. Goals, on the other hand, are not in our control and represent the lag measure. We should accept our circumstances, while doing whatever might have the greatest impact on our lives.
Systems are the key to achieving our goals and even developing passive income.
Why are systems better than goals?
As we mentioned already, goals are milestones for the undefined future, while systems are bridges to that future. Systems link our present self to our desired self by providing an actionable roadmap to reach our goal.
By focusing on the actions we can take right now, we give ourselves the power to succeed. We focus on the actions we can take right now that move us closer to our goals. In this way, we are in complete control and can set ourselves up for success.
Ultimately, we need to focus less on the desired end result and more on our daily habits. This is something James Clear discussed in Atomic Habits in that we can become 1% better everyday by focusing on our daily routines. Our daily actions may seem small at the time, but they compound over time and result in exponential growth.
The Stoics discussed something similar in terms of focusing on what we can control with the Stoic To-Do list. We can control our daily actions, though we can’t always control what will happen to us in the distant future.
We should always take responsibility for the lives that we know we deserve. The trick here is to focus on what we can control.
Achieving your goals with systems
Having made it this far, you understand what I mean by “fewer goals and more systems”. I’m not saying that goals are somehow bad or that they’re just for dreamers. I just mean it’s easy to fall into a trap of being overwhelmed by a never-ending list of goals and not knowing where to start. I know I’ve been there…
Achieving goals isn’t as simple as writing down what you want to achieve. You also need to understand what you need to do to make it happen. First, listing out the actions you need to take will bring you one step closer to achieving your goals.
Next, you should have a plan in terms of when and where you perform the necessary actions. Since we know what needs to be done at specific times and places, we can review our actions to see where we may be falling short against our original plan. We can then readjust our plan to improve our chances of success.
This is how we develop successful habits and processes that help us develop 1% everyday so that we eventually achieve our goals.
Learn the keys to success with systems and Mind & Practice.