Forget About Goals, Focus On Systems Instead
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For long since I’ve known me, I’ve always focussed on goals.
They have ranged from winning a tournament to getting the dream job. Achieving goals were my definition of achieving success and henceforth happiness. But happiness was some rare concept for my mind. After conquering my goal, I would get a sudden rush of what I thought happiness for max 1 week or so, and it never lasted long. And I was always in despair as to why this would fail to keep me happy. It would always end in search of new goals that would temporarily motivate me but at the same time would seem unrealistic, and that would make me sad despite my former achievements. For a while, I praise myself for being an overachiever, but my every step in this direction made me more depressed than ever so.
So I start to wonder what’s going wrong with my philosophy?
Then I came across this wonderful book — Atomic Habits, by James Clear. The author talks about Forget About Goals, Focus On Systems Instead…
System as he describes is the process that leads to those results we set our sights on.
So, for example, look at Cristiano Ronaldo, the Footballer I admire most. This person, whatever be the day, hour, or circumstances, never quits his training. From time unknown, I wondered what fuels his aspiration, why is he so fixated on his training, why does he never give up, what’s that he keeps pushing the bars high and become the better version of himself every day?
And the answer is -
He’s in love with excellence and training his body, it’s his part of identity and he takes pride in it. And it’s his commitment to excellence that he performs so well and conquer his goals like a king.
It’s the same as saying — “Don’t run after success, instead run after excellence, and you’ll see how it comes back at you.”
You might still not be convinced, right?
So let me list down the problems we face if choose to practice being goal focussed instead—
Many people have the same goals, but their implementation differs from one another to improve themselves to reach their goals persistently. It’s the system that causes different outcomes despite everyone starting the same initially.
As you can see in my case, just because I achieved some goal didn’t enlighten me the way it should have been. My happiness, satisfaction just remained thirsty till the end. It was just a momentary change, just a spike, which I initially thought would be a constant rise. There’s something definitely wrong with my goal-focused mind that again and again fails over to the past habits despite reaching an admirable state of change. It’s a problem at the system level that’s needed to be changed.
That’s why I highly agree on focussing on system level and outcomes would figure themselves out automatically.