My brief thoughts on Habits, Goals, and Systems

I’m currently reading “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear. I can’t reccommend it enough! There are countless actionable things in Clear’s book, but there are two specific ones I wanted to highlight for you:

Forget goals, focus on your system instead. You want to put fewer steps between you and the good behaviors and more steps between you and the bad ones.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

There’s nothing wrong with goals, so as long as we focus on building the systems to achieve said goal. It’s easy to say “I want to lose 10lbs”, but I think a question to ask when when hearing a goal is:

“What are the daily habits that you’ll put in place to hit that goal?

Another quote from the book that I wanted to highlight:

Reduce the friction and prime our envirommemt for the habits we’d like to develop. Habits aren’t a finish line to cross, but a lifestyle to live. Small habits compound.

Everyday, I work really hard to reduce the friction in my workflow so I could get things done. I’m not always successful, but the effort is definitely there! One thing I’ve done to decrease the likelihood of me getting distracted, is turning off all notifications on my phone nearly 4 years ago.

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