New Year’s Systems

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

We're all familiar with the above quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein. I've been thinking about this quote the past few days as we come to the end of the year. Across America, as many as 50% of adults make New Year's Resolutions and write them all in their bullet journals for the new year. However, according to research fewer than 10% actually end up following them for more than a few months.

I've been guilty of this in the past as well. My family and I often have an Annual Family Meeting to talk about our goals, type them up in a word document, and then proceed to absolutely ignore them.

This year, I'm approaching my New Year's Resolutions differently. I've been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear recently and this has completely changed my perspectives on personal development and success. In the first few chapters of the book, Clear basically eviscerates the concepts of goals and by extension "resolutions".

He writes that both winners and losers have the same goals. Every Olympian wanted to win the gold medal and every candidate wanted to get the job. Therefore, simply having a goal is not enough - what's actually important is achieving the change needed to accomplish them.

Goals, quite frankly, are useless by themselves because they aren't an effective avenue for consistent and lasting change. Goals or resolutions focus entirely on the results you desire. While it is certainly helpful to be clear about what you want, simply being aware of the result is not enough.

Systems, on the other hand, are about the process that leads to the results that you want. You should "trust the process", not lay your hopes in goals. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for actually making progress towards the end. Setting your New Year's Resolutions is just the first step.

When all your work is focused on particular goals there's nothing left to push you forward after achieving them. This is a trap of short term thinking. You don't want to lose 10 pounds - you want to become a healthy person on the back of a system that makes sure that you exercise for 30 mins every day.

Therefore, instead of simply listing our goals or resolutions for the year, we should go a step forward and build the systems that will help us achieve those end goals. Breaking the goals down into actionable steps that we can do every day to incrementally get better is the name of the game.

So instead of succumbing to insanity again this year, let's all take the further step from setting our New Year's Resolutions and plan New Year's Systems for 2021. We don't want to a part of the 90% of people who will quit a few months into the year, but rather we want to implement a system and processes that will actually lead us to achieve those goals.