Create Systems: Get World Class Results

Spend a day with a successful person and you’ll be bored

There are many fallacies that humans have come to believe that have not been given the scrutiny they deserve. It seems that we continue to fool ourselves into believing these myths as doing otherwise would contradict our intuition. Men continue to believe that if a woman is physically beautiful then all other favorable traits will be intact. We also believe that if someone does exceptionally well academically then they must possess some genius that has evaded us the mere mortals. Though we know (from experience) that life doesn’t always go according to ‘cliché’, we have difficulty pulling away from our faulty thinking.

One of the realities that we have difficulty accepting is that the successful life that we all crave requires a high tolerance for boredom. This is where we continuously miss it. Our nature to be happiness hunters often causes us to seek out pleasurable activities that sabotage our chances at success. The paradox of life is that it’s the individual who can resist what’s pleasurable that experiences the most pleasure. Now I am by no means saying that the lives of successful individuals are a total bore. Instead what you mostly find is that those who succeed in life are those who do what they sincerely love. However no matter your vocation, there are always unenjoyable aspects of it that just have to be done. It is the ability to consistently get these arduous things done that often separates the good from the great.

The secret of Systems and Routines

Is it then fair to say that the greats have more innate willpower than the average? Definitely not! The secret of their success is the establishment of systems and routines that ensure that what has to get done is done.

The ever ubiquitous app provided by dictionionary.com defines a system as “a coordinated body of methods or a scheme or plan of procedure.” Individuals who live great lives have ways of doing things that yield results every time. It’s the age old secret of the fast food industry, by employing culinary systems they are able to produce food that consistently have the same taste despite having locations all over the globe.

Not all systems are equal.

In order for a system to be effective it must use the least possible energy to create the system, maintain it and then execute the desired end. Our ability to do anything can be boiled down crudely to the availability of energy to execute a particular task. If a system is cumbersome and requires a great amount of energy for it to be established and maintained, then it will eventually break down.

Take for example — trying to develop a system that will allow you to consistently exercise (the assumption is that exercising is not your thing). If you create a system in which you schedule exercise at the gym incorporating hours of cardio and weights; you may find that it works in the short term, but since it requires a lot of energy to maintain this system you eventually give up.

Conversely if you establish a system that has room for growth built in and based on a slow (low energy) start up, the likelihood of maintaining consistency is significantly increased. This system may involve a daily 15 minute medium pace walk in your neighborhood. After a month of doing this, the time of the walk could be increased by 15 minutes, with similar time increases being enforced in subsequent months. After reaching an hour, you begin to make an hour long brisk walk your routine.

At this point you have built the habit of exercising and you would have established the self-belief that you can fulfill your commitments. You made a slow start (low start up energy) with incremental time increases (low maintenance energy) and have successfully developed a pattern of habitual exercise. Having built this momentum, it would now take very little energy to add the gym to your exercise routine.

The thing is we often only think of systems in terms of companies, but they can be applied to our lives to good effect. An important note however is that for a system to be effective it must be fluid. By that I mean it must have room for tweaks as you go along. No system is perfect from the get go, but with thoughtful adjustments they can yield results that would be impossible if you merely relied on brute force.

Develop your systems, use them consistently and witness world class results that you thought were previously impossible!