Have you ever heard this?
To be successful, you need to set goals.
Right?
While goals can be helpful (if they are used correctly), several studies point they can also do more harm than good.
Why goals can do more harm than good?
Imagine you set a goal to lose 40kg this year.
This is the metric that you define as your.
There is nothing wrong with that.
But what that means is that for the whole year, until the moment you achieve that state :
You will feel like a permanent failure.
Not only does it restrict your happiness and satisfaction while you are pursuing your goal.
But it makes it very hard and demotivating to start working towards it.
Because the goal seems so, so far in the future, that it feels like anything we do today won’t make any difference, so it’s hard to start.
The chances of you actually achieving the goal will be very scarce.
Humans need to feel like we are going somewhere.
We need to feel a sense of progress.
Science has proved time and time again to be one of the most important determinants of motivation.
Everyone has goals.
Including both winners and losers.
So there must be something else that will launch you forward for the vision that you have for yourself.
And that’s where systems enter the scene:
The solution — Systems
Systems are small, easy, and achievable things you do on a regular basis.
For example:
Instead of vague goals like:
“I want to lose 40kg this year.”
“I want to create a marketing agency business.”
A system would sound like:
“I will exercise 3 times every week in my local gym.”
“I will dedicate 1 hour every morning to creating my business.”
This way, you can feel the progress, and that will help you to stay motivated.
Systems make success an inevitable fate.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
How to set effective goals.
Goals can be helpful.
But they are only helpful when used with systems.
Setting goals and don’t having systems to get there.
It’s like having a map whiteout a compass.
Goals are good for setting the vision of where you want to get to. Just like a map.
But to get there, what you need is systems.
They forge the path from where you are, to where you want to be.
Brandon Sanderson - Author
Bringing it home
A quick review:
Goals can make you feel like a permanent failure because your success is behind a state that will only happen far in the future.
Systems are small, easy, and achievable, things that you do regularly , they give you a sense of progress and moving forward that increases your motivation.
Goals can be helpful , they set the vision of where you want to get to. But they need to be used with systems, that create the action path to get there.
I hope you got something valuable in this edition of Curiosity Fuel, and thank you for reading, it means the world.
It’s always an honor to be in your inbox, until next Sunday. 👋
— Idris Moura
