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- Heyo, id:: 658c7208-c6b5-4c78-9431-111fbae98145 - ok ok, about time I refined and structured my thinking on 'having a system'. - As a precursory reminder, remember a) we are creature of habits b) our environment has an incredible effect on our behavior. On a daily basis most of it is beyond our conscious control. Why? Because the amount of details to keep track of is just too much. We will not move an inch if we really decided to calculate everything consciously. Therefore we act via heuristics. The heuristics we often reliably fall onto are our habits and the "system" we have built around us OR the system that has surrounded us. - Some days are good, some days are bad. On good days we may set high achieving goals for ourselves but then what happens on a bad day? We fall back to our habits and system. The auto pilot takes over until we gain some will powers (a sort of muscle) to self motivate ourselves and kick start the next day to new goals and ambitions. This process repeats. What remains true though is the **fallback to our system**. I came across the idea of 'System vs Goals' in Scott Adams hilarious and yet highly pragmatic and effective self-management book - How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. He states: - For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run - If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. - If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. - Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction. - Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction - In the world of dieting, **losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system.** - My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals. - The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it. - Imagine Scott Adams as your stereotypical finance MBA nerd who can neither really draw nor has ever accomplished anything via creative endeavors. Yet, his created the most famous comic strip of all time than ran for over 30 years in over 300+ newspaper across the world known as Dilbert. He talks about his success: - My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal oriented instead of system oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall. But being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on. - And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off. Today’s the day. - If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. - This idea of System vs Goals was well put as a one liner in a now modern classic book Atomic Habits as: **You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.** This captures the idea in it's essence. So what does it mean for you and me? It means creating a system for yourself that is not brittle to failure. **In a nutshell, this is good engineering!** This is how we build resiliency in software systems. A system that can be be kicked of as small thing that works, is maintainable (this simple), and can be evolved. We then iterate. - I have mini systems myself that roughly connect together into the larger system that I have seen myself fall back onto every other day. Good day or bad day. In fact bad days are when I really relish in the system. Just the thought of it makes the bad.. good :). This letter being written at 6 AM in the morning is an example output of my system. If not for my 'morning routine' I would have procrastinated, I would not have had the idea of 'writing letters as a style of note making blogging', and in fact I might not be capturing much of anything that I reflect upon daily. if not for 'Logseq' - my personal knowledge management tool for capturing mostly everything quickly unstructured, I wold not have compounded myriads of ideas that I can connect the dots on and build a cohesive thought and belief - such as this letter. All this to say, once you consciously start building a system for yourself it morphs, it updates, and evolves with you. It's becomes self motivating meta system. - In closing, remember sophisticated ideas are double edged swords. They cut both ways. There are many examples of people I know who take this idea and get overly involved in building 'the system' - as in never fucking up, the perfect system. **This is just as bad as not having a system.** System is a means to an end. It should not be an end in itself. Also, my litmus test for myself is that that I can throw away everything and I will still be fine. I can restart. I can take a vacation. I am allowed to slack. My system is not a life support. It's my caffeine. I can quit anytime. But for now, let's get productive. - References and Recommended Readings - Books / How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Books/Atomic Habits - Over and out my man, keep it simple :) Sid Sarasvati -