Forget about setting goals – focus on this instead


Everyone says you should set goals in life, right? And there are so many things you might want to do in your life, and you’ll need to work toward them. It could be losing weight, it could be saving for a home, or it might even be writing that novel you’ve been planning for so long. For many of us, the first step toward achieving that is to set a goal for the future.

As great as it might seem to set yourself goals, there are actually better ways of working toward these achievements. Goals are all well and good, but they also give us an excuse to keep making goals, and never actually achieving goals. So, a better approach to take may well be to come up with systems rather than goals.

What’s the difference?

Once you can understand what the difference is between a goal and a system it is easier to work towards achieving your aim. Your goal might be your end game, what you want to accomplish going forward. However, your system is the way you implement your process, and what you do to get there. The system is much more important because it shows how you are going to achieve your goals, and it keeps you disciplined and focused.

Forget about setting goals – focus on this instead

Systems can replace goals

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you didn’t actually set a goal, and instead just focused on your system? Would you wind up actually achieving the same outcome in the end anyway? There is actually pretty strong evidence to suggest that you would, and this is something to bear in mind. For instance, if you set yourself a strategy of writing for an hour every day, you would eventually complete your novel naturally. So you could do that without having to set it as a separate goal.

Goals can reduce happiness

If you set yourself a lot of goals all the time, you’re going to constantly be comparing your current situation to your dream situation. This is counterintuitive, because it’s easy to think the grass is always greener, and we are always comparing what we have against what we want. In this instance, goals can actually reduce happiness, and be a negative rather than a positive.

You can’t predict the future

Goals give you the feeling that you have influence over outcomes you actually don’t have any influence over. It’s important to make sure you don’t stake too much on a goal as you can’t predict the future. Having goals is passive, whereas accomplishing and achieving is proactive, so you need to make sure you are working toward this all the time.

As you can see, it actually might be more beneficial to you to do away with the concept of goals and have a system instead. This is the best way of implementing the effort and dedication necessary to work toward achieving a particular goal. Instead of setting goals for your future, why don’t you think about implementing a strategy and system instead?

Forget about setting goals – focus on this instead

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