Systems and habits

If you want to know about a person, you should look at the systems and habits in their life. These will tell you where a person is going.

If they have the habit of eating right and exercising daily, they will likely move towards health. If they have the habit of eating fast food and watching TV for hours, they are likely moving away from health.

If they are budgeting their money and spending within their means, they will likely acquire money for the future. If they are spending sporadically and beyond their means, they will likely acquire debt for the future.

If they spend their time watching news shows from a particular political party, they will move towards the edges of the spectrum, not the middle.

If a child is raised in a loving home, they will be more inclined to build that structure when they raise a child. If someone is curious and always wanting to learn more that system will help them acquire more knowledge and wisdom over time.

Systems and habits are incredibly powerful. They are the force that drive our life and determine where we are going. It doesn’t mean people can’t change. It means we are more likely to follow our existing habits than go against them.

Take the two examples of health and offer them a piece of pie? That piece of pie is meaningless compared to their lifestyle habits and systems around nutrition and exercise.

Give the two examples of money and debt a raise and they will even back out to saving money or spending more than they make.

The systems and habits are powerful because they overtake any one-time event in the system. They are used to handling fluctuations and do so by perpetuating the current system.

This means that if we are honest about what we want in life, we can design the systems and habits to help get us there.

One of the greatest systems thinkers of all time is Donella Meadows. In her book, Thinking in Systems she says, “If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backwards and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching a fly.”

This helps us understand the direction of the system instead of the one-off events. The pattern, the theme, the purpose remains even when the tactics change.

When we look at our own life, we ignore this pattern/theme/purpose and focus on the events. Sure, the events string together to form the pattern. But the pattern is what we are after, that forms systems and habits.

This leads to the concept of implicit and explicit goals. Explicit goals are the expressed goals that we set. The implicit goals are the ones that go unsaid. They drive our behavior even when we express that we want something else.

Most of us will talk about all the goals we have. We talk about our desire for perfect health. We crave more money to feel more secure. But we ignore the full system. We form habits that push us further from those goals. If that is what we want, why do we sabotage our efforts?

That is where we find the misalignment with implicit and explicit goals. To change, we have to change those implicit goals. We can’t just say we want it to be different. We must do the work.

Forming new systems and habits helps us to realign those 2. The driver that keeps us going is the systematic nature of the new steps we take. When those become habit, they have their own power.

Then it becomes easier to form explicit goals and make changes to our lifestyle to help us reach them.

Our own systems and habits are some of the most powerful aspects in our lives. And they are more controllable than we realize!

Learn how to see those patterns, systems, habits, routines, etc. Then learn how to focus on that level to create change. This will unlock a future you that will achieve what you want and do what you explicitly wish, and hope, would happen.