Everything Has A System

In personal development, I have quite a contrarian approach. There’s a lot of talk about having good habits and I think many people miss the mark because of it. Yes, absolutely it’s critical to have good habits if you want to maximize your potential, but you don’t get good habits by building good habits…

You get good habits by building good systems.

And the thing that many people don’t realize is that everything has a system whether you realize it or not. Things don’t just happen on their own. There’s a relationship called ‘cause and effect’ that takes the inputs and converts them into the tangible outputs of choices, actions, and results. And they’re embedded in everything we do.

The most basic system we have for doing anything is trying to remember to do something.  Our system for brushing our teeth is remembering to do it before we go to bed. Our system for keeping in touch with our parents our siblings is calling them spontaneously on the days and times that we think. Our system for eating healthy is trying to remember to choose the healthy option in the moment. Our system for running an errand is trying to remember to do it.

As you can imagine, a low-quality, unreliable system like that leads to low-quality, unreliable choices, actions and results. So if you want to treat the important areas of your life with more intention you need to build the underlying system that helps you make more intentional choices.

Instead of just trying to remember to call your loved ones, you could have a system where you’ve coordinated to call them every Friday during lunch. Or instead of trying to remember to eat healthy, you have a system for putting healthy foods on your grocery list that you refer to when you go to the market on Mondays after your workout. Instead of trying to remember to do an errand you can write it down, or better yet schedule an efficient time to do it that fits well into your plans for the day.

The more you design the system, the more you control how ‘cause and effect’ works and the more you shape the choices or actions that come next. Yet, too often people who want to build the habit of exercising more, getting to bed on time, or being in better touch with loved ones don’t update their underlying systems and therefore, are fully reliant on will-power and memory to bring positive change to their life.

If you feel like you’ve had a hard time getting consistent with good habits, or like you can’t stay focused or be as productive as you’d like to be, it’s more a matter of your systems than your habits. And in the 21 Day Challenge I lead, I help you install the single underlying life-operating system that I call the Super Habits System and it changes everything.