Goals are for losers!
Winners have a system which involves some things that you do every day as a routine that increase your odds of achieving success in a non-specific way in the future.
In this post, I’ll tell you how you can be successful every day. And more importantly, how you can hugely improve your odds of winning big in life. You will be surprised to know that in order to improve your odds of winning big in the long run, you’re going to have to dump—wait for it—your goals!
Scott Adams, in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, presents the idea of Goals vs. Systems. He goes so far as to say that goals are for losers. Systems are better than goals. And winners have systems.
When I read the book in 2016, the idea of having systems instead of goals potently resonated with me. It changed my whole perspective on how I was living my own life with respect to self-improvement. It is perhaps the single best mindset shift I have had that has filled me with unending optimism.
Let me start expounding on the idea of goals vs. systems by first talking a bit about happiness, as to what really makes us happy.
Sources of happiness
There are broadly two sources of happiness:
Random good things happening to you
On a given day, if something good happens in your life, you will feel happy
Problem: Something good happening every day is not guaranteed, because we don’t particularly aim for good things to happen every day. They happen randomly once in a while. Much of it just happens by luck. So we can say that this happiness is "accidental"
Success (achieving what you were aiming for)
You feel happy when you succeed
Problem: This also happens once in a while because you don’t achieve your goals every day. Goals are usually medium-to-long-term things. So on most days, you are working towards your goals, and that’s not the same as success
Accidental happiness—one which arises out of random good things happening to you—is out of our control. So we won’t talk about accidental happiness anymore. That leaves us with happiness from success. And that’s where systems are better than goals.
As I said, on most days, you are working towards your goals, which is not the same as success. Success is when you finally achieve a goal. So with goals, you succeed only when you achieve a goal—if you achieve it at all. But what if you replace goals with systems?
Why success matters
Let’s say you are a goal-oriented person. You set goals and you achieve those goals. You feel happy when you succeed in achieving your goals. When you achieve your goals, it is this feeling of success that gives you happiness. This success is what propels you forward.
Success is important in that it provides meaning in life. If you’re not aiming for things, you lack meaning in life. If you aim for things but don’t achieve those things, then that’s a lot of demotivation and you lose the meaning and may feel depressed.
For a meaningful life, therefore, it is important to aim for things and to achieve things. It is important to succeed.
Why goals are not good for success
With goals, you can taste success only once in a while. Goals won’t make you feel successful constantly every day. Because you only feel successful when you achieve a goal. On most days, you will be working towards your goals, or worse, failing.
Since feeling successful is connected to a sense of meaning in life, you need to maintain the feeling of being successful. Only then would your self-worth and motivation stay up. Goals don’t help you with it on a day-to-day basis. And believe it or not, most people don’t achieve most of their goals. That’s such an assault on their self-worth.
If my goal is to become a fitness trainer five years down the line, I’ll have my focus on that goal. When my focus is solely on one goal, I might miss other opportunities coming my way. And since I’m devoted to this goal, I may not learn anything else. I won’t put in the time to learn the guitar, for example. Or I’ll not write blogs. I’ll not learn about technology. I’m only focusing on things that will help me achieve my goal of being a fitness trainer. And that seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do. Being devoted and intensely focused on your goal is considered to be a good thing, right?
But let’s say if something goes wrong with my body like if I have an accident or get some illness, or something happens that affects my ability to become a fitness trainer. Or let’s say after five years, I find that the practice and preparation I did to achieve that goal was not sufficient. I’m still not there. In five years, anything can happen to keep me from achieving the goal on which I have been intensely and singularly focused. In such a case, I would have lost many other opportunities that came my way while I was focused on the goal. Since I won’t have developed myself in other areas, I might end up getting nowhere.
Besides, we now live in an extremely complex world where technologies are changing so fast that it is not even wise to set a long-term goal and devote all the time and energy to that goal. In the long run, the goal you set for yourself may not be the best thing for you. In that case, you may achieve the goal and still not feel successful if it isn’t the optimal thing anymore.
Scott Adams says that in these fast-changing times, achieving your goal is like riding on a horse with only one arrow and trying to shoot with that arrow a target that is moving all the time. The odds of success in a meaningful way are dismal.
Systems for success
As Scott Adams puts it:
A system involves some things that you do every day as a routine that increase your odds of achieving success in a non-specific way in the future.
It means that, as a systems person, you would do several things every day. My current system, for example, involves working out for 45 minutes, practicing a musical instrument for 15 minutes, reading for an hour, etc. You may have five to six things, or more, or less. But there must be several things of interest to you that you do regularly every day.
I don’t have a hard and fast goal of being a fitness trainer. I don’t have the goal of being a professional guitarist. I don’t have a goal of being a writer. I’m working on all these things purely out of interest, more like a hobby. What makes it powerful, however, is that they are part of my system. So I do them as a routine every day. And it doesn’t require much willpower as I’m not doing anything to the extent that would burn me out. I don’t have to make strenuous efforts because I don’t have the pressure of achieving goals.
If I set a goal, say, to become a fitness trainer, there is a chance I will not achieve it and thus fail. But in the systems approach, I don’t have a goal, so there’s no way I can fail. My system only requires me to do certain things I already do in little portions every day. And since they are things I’m interested in, I will most likely succeed in doing them consistently.
So then, which one is easier and more likely to make me succeed tomorrow? Carrying the uncertain goal to be achieved years down the line, or adhering to the system that requires me to do small things that I’m interested in?
As a person with a systems approach, you succeed every day. And that keeps you happy every day. Your self-worth and motivation levels are always up. All you have to do is a few small things as a routine every day. If you do those small things that don’t require much willpower, you are successful.
And systems can evolve. You may give up some hobbies and pick up new ones. What is important is to pick the things you are genuinely interested in and practice them every day without having high expectations.
The long-run
When you have a system that involves doing something every day as a routine, you keep getting better at those things. Improvement is bound to happen. So, in the long run, your chances of striking it rich with one of those things are increasing. You just don’t know at the moment which of those things will work out.
In the long run, you will find that you were not shackled by your goals. Instead, you will likely be better at multiple things. In the book, Scott Adams also explains how being good at multiple things greatly improves your odds of success as opposed to being the best at any one thing.
If you don’t have a goal, you can’t fail. And with systems, you can be more certain than a person with goals about winning big someday.