Forget about goals, focus on systems - ArtursAdvice

"Forget about goals, focus on systems instead", that is a line from the international bestseller Atomic Habits written by James Clear. If you don't know him, James Clear is a self-improvement blogger with great articles. If you want to improve yourself I recommend you to check it out. His book Atomic Habits promises "an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones". If that is your goal then his book will help you.
Those of you, that are not familiar with the concept of habits, might wonder what "forget about goals" and "focus on systems" is all about. Those are fundamentals that are explained in the first chapter really well. I will try to give you a short explanation, so you can understand why people including me are so fascinated by habits. James Clear defines a habit as "a routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation." You probably already knew that but did you knew that almost everything in our life is controlled by habits. Even this article is only written because I write an ArtursAdvice article every Wednesday. We spend most of our time in autopilot and that is the time that really matters. Your autopilot could steer you into lying on the couch, watching TV and eating chips after work or it could steer you into making a healthy dinner and going outside for a walk. Whatever it is after eight hours of work you just don't have the mental energy or discipline to resist whatever your habits tell you to do. That is why habits matter. The author also emphasises that even small (atomic) habits can compound to huge changes after a long enough time.

Let's talk about goals. James Clear names four reasons why goals are not helpful in the longterm. First of all winners and losers have the same goals, so setting goal doesn't seem to make any difference. Second: Achieving goals is only temporarily. You can clean up your room once, but the habit that made it messy in the first place will undo your achievement again and again. Third: If you define your happiness as "achieving a goal", then setting gaols actually restrict your happiness. Often those goals are set at the start of your journey and as I always say "the path becomes clearer as you walk it." The world is constantly changing and so are you. Maybe the goals you set yesterday don't matter any more because you found another way. I found it extremely demotivating when I realized that my goals didn't matter anymore. Finally, goals are at odds with long term progress because a goal is something you finish and then you are done. Many runners train hard for the race, but they stop training afterwards and fall back into the state they were before the training. What is the point in that? Changing habits is different. You change your daily routines with the purpose to maintain the change forever. And you actually get results. Setting goals means planing what you want to achieve, constructing habits means transforming yourself into a person that get stuff done. Transforming yourself also means changing your identity and according to James Clear, it is actually the real reason why habits matter: You can become the person you want to be by changing your habits.
The first step on the journey of becoming the person you want to be is to decide who this person is. The book gives a little help with that, but ultimately only you can know the answer and as always this might change. What the book is mostly about is how to change your habits, your behaviour to actually become the person you want to be. If I had to summarize the main essence of Atomic Habits in one sentences it would be: "To create a habit make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying and to break a habit make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying." How to do that exactly? Atomic Habits contains hundreds of pages full of explanations, examples and strategies. In my eyes, this book is pure gold.
If you are unhappy with who you are, you should change that. Reading Atomic Habits and applying the techniques is a great way to do that. I wish you the best on your journey to becoming the person you want to be and hope you have a great day today.