Succeed Every Day: Goals vs Systems
Have something you’d like to achieve? Some methods can be more useful than others when you’d like to succeed. In his novel How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams highlights the difference between goals and systems and points out how reframing goals into systems allow us to succeed. Goal setting is a concept deeply ingrained in us, so how can we make the shift and why?
Firstly, let’s unpack the differences between goals and systems. Goals are typically end-points. From aiming to obtain a certification or making a lifestyle change, our goals are often a destination to reach. These end-points are what we look towards to motivate ourselves and before we reach them, we have yet to achieve our goals. Systems, on the other hand, are actions we can perform consistently over the long term. Scott Adams highlights the key difference between goals and systems with this guideline: If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal.
The inherent nature of a goal being an end-point means that prior to reaching that end-point, we have yet to achieve anything. As Adams puts it, goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. If you’d like to master a language, setting up the goal of mastery can not only be vague but daunting and too far off. Taking into account Adam’s words, it would also put you in a state of failure. In essence, this would translate to having a lack of mastery of the language for the vast majority of your learning journey and would likely be demoralising. Turn language mastery into a system and you are likely to find yourself more consistent in practising the steps required for it. For example, you could implement a system of listening to one podcast a day and learning a certain number of words each week. Through this system, you create a sustainable journey of learning and you succeed every day. Having and celebrating small everyday victories is a good way to encourage yourself and keep your morale high.
However, that is not to say that goals should be discarded completely. Goals can be useful as well. Knowing what works best for you and how to set yourself up for success is part of the equation as well. Goals can be useful for more short-term aspirations or can serve as an overarching guideline while working hand in hand with a system. The key to making your ambitions a reality lies in ensuring the sustainability of your journey and keeping yourself going. Being strict with the definition of your goals and berating yourself for being far from achieving it can create negative feelings of failure which hinder you or make you give up completely. Therefore, a balance of systems and goals which work in your favour would be the best.
At BCD, we have in place systems which allow you to better yourself each day. Every day is a new day to achieve a little something and consistent, sustainable growth is something that we push for. If this sounds like what you’re looking for, reach out to us. At BCD, our focus is YOU.
