Why Systems Thinking Will Make You Successful In Life?

Systems thinking – designing systems for success and executing them every day – is the key to long-term success in life. Success has less to do with goals, but more to do with systems.

As described in How To Be Successful In Life? Align Systems With Goals!: goals provide direction, systems provide progress. James Clear, in Atomic Habits, says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

In How To Change Your Life For Better? Change Your Identity (in 3 Steps)!, we detailed the first step for success: embracing an identity. By analyzing what makes this identity or role model successful, we were able to identify beliefs and vision, value goals and outcome goals.

• Identity: I am a blogger for the rest of my life. (long-term commitment)
• Beliefs/Vision: I believe I have valuable information to share with my readers.  (Why do I blog?)
• Value goals: I value my readers’ time, hence, I will analyze and cull the best information from different sources and present them in an actionable form.
• Outcome goals (Top 3):
  • I want to write 50 blog posts this year.
  • I want to increase traffic to my blog by 200% this year.
  • I want to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To achieve these goals, we need success systems, as described in our 7 step formula for success (How to Succeed in Life? By Building Systems For Success!.

Systems thinking provides structure, stability, predictability and regularity

Systems provide a framework for decision-making.

Every day, we don’t need to think about what to do, consider and evaluate multiple choices, agonize over making the right decision, be ambivalent over whether we are wasting our time – we just execute our system, over and over again.

We approach every day with a positive mindset, we know which system to execute and when. We are happy we are doing what will lead us in the right direction.

What are systems for success in life?

Systems are a collection of actions and behaviors that move us consistently towards the outcomes we desire.

• If we want to lose 20 pounds, we need systems for healthy eating and exercise.
• If we want to run a 5K race, we need a system for training for the race.
• If we want to increase traffic to a blog by 200%, we need systems for writing blog posts and better SEO.

The key principle when designing systems, especially in the beginning, – the actions need to be small, so we can execute them consistently, every day.

With time, these small actions, when executed consistently, day after day, will yield giant results – a basic principle of compounding with time. This is why systems thinking is so powerful and how systems can drive your success!

The fundamental algorithm in systems thinking is:

Step 1. Design the simplest system possible for the outcome you desire, so simple that you can’t fail

Step 2. Execute Step 1 every day, day after day.

This leads to small, consistent wins, which, in turn, reinforces our identity, which, in turn, strengthens our ability to execute the system.

What we are building is the habit of consistently executing our systems!

Once this feedback look is established and consistent, we can think of expanding our system to include more steps.

A system is useless if we don’t execute it!

A simple system will provide a stable foundation for scalability and growth.

In the next post, What Will Make You Successful? Building Effective Systems For Success!, we pick outcome goals and show how to design success systems for achieving them.