Why You Might Be Better Off Without Goals…
… and why systems are far more effective
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I bet we all have said the following.
“Once I get [X], I will be happy.”
or
“Once I do [X], I won’t be stressed.”
But what usually happens after you do the [X], you still aren’t happy or relaxed. So goals are clearly not going to help. This is why systems are so much more effective. They help you keep working instead of stopping once you finish.
1. Winners And Losers Have the Same Goals
Goals follow the survivorship bias, where people only focus on the successful while forgetting about all the others who failed before them.
It is easy for someone to get false information about this. They see the successful have goals and it tells them that they should do it too. But in reality, many fail before one survives to succeed.
The statement “Once I get [X], I will be happy” is not useful because once you finish the activity you won’t be happy for long because another goal will need to be completed.
2. Do You Really Want to Finish Playing the Game
Is your goal to finish the book, or to become a reader?
Do you want to write an article, or to become a writer?
These are a few examples of why goals are if you only want to finish the game, instead of wanting to keep playing the game.
Life is a game. You choose to keep playing or to stop and do something else. Decisions need to be made to few accomplishments.
So instead of looking at goals as an endpoint, it should be more like an identity change. Goals are needed but setting them on the right things is important.
Once you finish a goal, you stop playing the game and if the game is enjoyable you want to keep going. This is why to keep playing the game you need something else other than goals.
3. So If Goals Are So Bad, Then What Should I Use Instead?
Systems.
Systems are essential because they let you keep playing the game of life and have a clear path forward.
For example, if you want to become a reader then you should put a book on your table before you go to bed so that in the morning you will read it. Doing it day in and day out is essential to building a habit and to keep playing the game.
To create a system you should find a specific time and place where you will do the task. Don’t let anything interfere with it. A template could be:
I will do [X thing] at [Y place] at [Z time] every day.
So creating that habit of doing it every day will make your brain correlate that time and environment for doing that task. The more you do it, the easier it will get.
Last Words
Goals are useful but can often hurt you. This is why systems are better. They allow you to keep working instead of just finishing the work. This is highly useful if you are working on a huge project and to keep working on it every single day.
So switch to systems to achieve your goals, but don’t stop when you finish your goal, keep going.
