Quick, easy and effective

We all want more out of life. We want happiness and success. We want pleasure and achievement. We all want to have great health and wellness. We want wealth that grows larger over time.

While we all want those things, we all go about life differently. Some people sacrifice and work hard, trying to gain one or more on that list. Some people see the difficulty in trying to reach those goals and simply give up.

Those who give up, usually do so only after several failed attempts. However these failed attempts almost always follow a pattern. The pattern leads to failure but we replicate it over and over.

The pattern goes like this: we get excited and motivated at a new goal so we charge right into the work to try and get what we want immediately. We try everything we can to get that goal now. We want it so bad that we want it now or never.

But that is the problem. Because most worthwhile ambitions in life are not something that is accessible right now, we never get there. We sacrifice the option of getting there someday by trying to get there today.

If we want to succeed in an area we have to learn that there are three options for us. It can be quick, easy or effective. We choose which of the three is most important to us as we start out on our journey to achieve something.

Most people opt for quick. But by choosing quick, we lose the effectiveness. So we end up rushing to failure.

Some people want it to be easy and then realize quickly that going after a goal with lower enthusiasm just means it won’t be an effective approach.

Some people sacrifice the quick and the easy to choose effectiveness. They do the hard work and then they are able to enjoy the effectiveness of their approach. But most people learn along this path that the rewards are not worth the efforts and they have to work much harder than they thought and the rewards are much less fruitful than they anticipated.

But we can choose two of the options if we do so carefully. We can have it quickly and effective but it certainly won’t be easy. We can have it easy and effective but it certainly won’t be quick.

The systems and habits approach to improvement focuses on easy and effective. It puts off the immediate desire to have it now, and instead takes a very slow approach that includes making slight changes to our routines and habits and then doing the new routine over and over and over again until they become automatic. It leverages time to help your efforts build and grow to ultimately take you to the goal.

This is easy because each step is so small. We don’t take giant leaps towards our goals; we make slight adjustments and then work to make those adjustments become the norm.

This also allows us to focus on many goals at the same time. We can do things that will help in any of the previously mentioned categories – health, wellness, wealth etc. At first it won’t be very effective but when we do it for long enough, we will be able to start to build on each step.

After the first change, we start making another small change towards our goal. As that one becomes easy and automatic, we start another one.

We can do this over and over again. It allows us to be flexible because we can keep adjusting and molding our approach with the knowledge we have now. We don’t build a master plan and then execute, we keep evaluating and adjusting while each step becomes a solid base on which to build.

The systems and habits approach to improvement works to ignore an immediate return and instead shift to focus on continuous improvement. We are constantly in this state of altering our habits and routines so we can achieve more and more with less and less effort. Over time this can be an incredibly effective strategy, as long as we can delay our urge to have it now.