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Using systems and habits to improve your life is a proven method to succeed. It requires seeing the work as a system and then adjusting your thoughts and behaviors to be able to take advantage of your opportunities in life.
People value immediate rewards over future rewards. We want instant gratification, not a future benefit.
This makes it difficult to make consistent, positive choices. We want to see the rewards right away and will even take less now just to make sure we get it without delay.
Read MoreWhen it comes to designing systems and habits to be successful, most people think you need to think outside the box. Remove all limitations and then brainstorm ideas until you find the most innovated one.
This approach is common but flawed. Thinking outside the box sounds great until we realize we could do anything. Being able to do anything is too complex, too broad, and too overwhelming.
Read MoreWhen people set goals to help them improve, they run into many problems. Goals are great to measure performance against expected outcomes. But goals are horrible for actual improvement.
Goals don’t address the steps you need to take. They don’t address the process. They focus solely on what the expected outcome is and why it is a good guess.
Read MoreIn my book, You Can’t Surf from the Shore, I outline the flaws in my early decision-making. Instead of being active in deciding what I wanted in life, I defaulted to whatever was easy and obvious.
I went to college because it was easier to go to college than fight my parents about my desire for another path. I worked the retail job I kept after college because I didn’t want to spend the time applying to jobs. Each choice felt less like a choice and more like I had to do it.
Read MoreAn object in motion wants to stay in motion and an object at rest wants to stay at rest. While we have all heard this in physics class, the reality is that it applies beyond the science lab.
When we want to change human behavior, we run into the same principle. I used to think that we all were pulled towards inaction. We would rather choose to sit and relax instead of going to work out.
Read MoreWhen it comes to our hopes and desires in life, I’ve noticed that there is a shift as I make my way through life. What started as ambitious dreams have turned into daily realizations of reality.
Part of this is the normal aging process. Research has shown that happiness and life satisfaction follow a curve. They are high in our twenties but slowly decrease. They dip until around age 45 (in the U.S.) and then start rising again.
Read MoreMany people want more happiness and success in their life. They want to achieve. They want the rewards. They want to have the confidence that comes with obtaining their goals and dreams.
When I was younger, I craved success. I said that I would do anything to have more success and more money.
Read MoreWhen I was overseeing the operations of a growing company, we were always trying to find ways to innovate and improve the team. We wanted to be able to scale the operations and to do that we knew that we needed to find better ways to work.
It sounds easy but is very difficult. The challenge is often to avoid change for the sake of change and to find true improvements. Everyone has ideas for changing something on the team. But rarely did that idea translate into an increase in production.
Read MoreFor most of us, life is long. It seems short. It always feels that yesterday we were 10 years younger. Or we reminisce when our kids were small and the memory burns in our mind as if it was a week ago instead of a decade ago.
Our memory shapes this idea that life is short. We cut out so much of the mundane and capture vivid details of those weeks of travel, or holidays, or special events. We don’t waste precious memory for the boring routines. We don’t recall how many times we followed some ingrained habit.
Read MoreIf you are building systems and habits in your life, you know the value of consistently taking action. One aspect that you will encounter is when the system that has a delay that seems harmless but is really destructive.
Delays in systems are normal. When you start exercising, you don’t see results related to your actions for a while. Instead, you have a pause. You keep working out and keep eating right but don’t see positive results.
Read MoreIf you want to understand systems, you need to be able to spot patterns and structures. Business systems, government systems, etc. all have many systematic elements that drive their movement.
One easy way to see through the marketing lingo or the rhetoric is to follow the money. The money will tell you what is important. It will tell what direction that entity is headed.
Read MoreMost people want to improve. They want to get better. They want better health. They desire better financial security. They crave healthier relationships.
Often, it isn’t that we don’t want to improve. It is that we run out of capacity. We fill our days with everything else, all the tasks that we must do and responsibilities we need to track.
Read MoreMost people get enamored by the overnight success. They see someone go from rags to instant riches.
This shifts our perspective. We start to feel that the overnight success is more common than it is. We don’t realize when someone spent years working on their craft, we only see them turn into a smash hit, not the journey they took.
Read MoreThe systems and habits approach to improvement is a great way to incorporate structure and habit in your life to help you become happy and successful.
By developing processes and routines and then following them, we can control the steps we take. Instead of relying on willpower, we rely on automatic behavior responses.
Read MoreWhen we use the systems and habits approach to improvement, we often build out new habits over months and even years. The goal is to build recurring behavior patterns that drive us to success.
This means that consistency is key. We must make sure we follow the steps in the same way for long enough for it to start to feel automatic.
Read MoreSystems thinking is a powerful mindset that can help shape your thoughts and actions throughout life. Instead of seeing one-off events, you see systems.
When I say systems, I don’t mean physical systems. Sure, there is a mechanical system that controls the temperature in my house. There is a physical system that is used to create your car. There is an engine system for your lawnmower.
Read MoreSystems and habits are powerful. If you are not designing your systems and habits, you are leaving your life to chance.
The odds are that many positive habits will be created during your lifetime. There are parents, teachers, coaches and friends who all help generate the mental models necessary to create those habits.
Read MoreThe systems and habits approach to improvement is a powerful way to achieve happiness and success by redesigning our life. We take the daily routines and adjust them until they start to provide us with the prosperity and bliss we crave.
The key is consistency. We have to be consistent enough to take these adjustments and form new habits from them. Without habits we fall short. Willpower is fleeting and motivation hides when we need it most.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreStudying systems, I’ve learned how valuable they can be to solve problems. But a common misconception is that they are rigid and inflexible.
This idea comes from the fact that systems are often meant to maintain consistency. We design a system to accomplish a goal. The system keeps going and going trying to solve the problem the same way that we designed.
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