Forget About Setting Goals. Focus On This Instead
Thriving In Your Business & Your Life
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Following on from our last blog about the importance of discipline & consistency over motivation, we’ve taken a few more lessons from James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” book, to reiterate the power of systems.
Of course not.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
For example, the goal in any sport is to finish with the best score but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard.
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your own systems.
Here are four problems with focussing on goals rather than systems.
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 want 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.
Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it.
If you tidy up, then you will have a clean room – for now.
But if you maintain the same sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter.
You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it.
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.
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.”
You’re continually putting off happiness until the next milestone.
A systems-first mentality provides the antidote.
When you fall in love with the process rather than the result, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
A goal-oriented mindset 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. I was literally that guy after I ran the London Marathon.
When all of your hard work is focussed on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game.
The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.
None of this is to say that goals are useless.
Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win.
Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.
We’ve set out the core systems that we deliver in this next article.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss building better systems in your business (and life).
