7th January 2025
Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals.
For many years, this was how I approached my habits too.
I succeeded at a few goals, but I failed at a lot of them.
Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set & nearly everything to do with the systems I followed and actions I took.
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. The only way to actually win is to get better each day.
In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.”
The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system & processes instead.
Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your 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 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.
Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
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.
None of this is to say that goals are useless. However, I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.
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.
Fall In Love With Systems & processes and the goals will take care of themselves.
Stay blessed forever.
(The writeup has excerpts from the book, ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear)