What Will Make You Successful? Building Effective Systems For Success!

What will make you successful in life? Not new goals, you have plenty of those!

What we need instead is to create more effective success systems instead of goals – systems that get you moving, taking action towards the goal.

The keys to success in life are designing systems and executing them, consistently, day after day.

• To lose 20 pounds, design a system for healthy eating and eating less.
• To write 50+ blog posts a year, design a system for writing one blog post, and apply that repeatedly.
• To be able to do 25 pushups, design a system for exercising.

As we saw in Why Systems Thinking Will Make You Successful In Life?, we start with the simplest system – a system so simple, you simply can’t fail.

 It could be just one action or behavior.

• To lose 20 pounds, we start with a system that requires you to walk for 5 minutes after dinner.
• To write 50+ blog posts a year, we start with a system that requires you to write 50 words a day.
• To be able to do 25 pushups, we start with a system that requires you to do one simpler pushup.

Then we keep working to ensure we execute this consistently, day after day.

These small, consistent, daily wins help solidify our new identity, and build a feedback loop to help us execute harder, more sophisticated, systems.

What we are building is the habit of performing our systems.

Designing better success systems

A more elaborate success system consists of a set of actions, and may include habits, routines and workflows. We upgrade systems when we have proven to ourselves we can execute simpler systems.

With more comprehensive systems for success come greater risk of failure to execute – we address this with by incorporating habits and routines, and more advanced psychological tricks.

Habits for success

A habit is a behavior that is so deeply ingrained in us that we do this almost unconsciously – things like brushing our teeth in the morning, washing our hands after we use the toilet, and driving the same route to work.

As described by James Clear in Atomic Habits – a habit cycle consists of 4 components – a cue that triggers the behavior, a craving that motivates the behavior, a response that is the actual behavior, and a reward for executing the behavior.

By understanding each of these components and their psychological basis, we can form better habits, maintain or enhance good habits, and break bad habits.

Routines for deliberate behavior

A routine is a set of behaviors that requires effortful action. We may have an exercise routine that involves packing our gym clothes when we leave for work, stopping at the gym on the way back, changing and working out, and then heading home.

A routine requires conscious thought, deliberation and effort.

Habits vs routines

As Nir Eyal explains in Stop Confusing Habits for Routines: What You Need To Know, we have to bring ourselves to do a routine: “Unlike a routine, which feels uncomfortable to do, in the case of a habit, not doing the behavior feels bad.“

If my habit is to wash my face after I wake up, and, for some reason, I can’t – I feel icky the rest of the morning.

If my routine is to go to the gym after work, and, for some reason – maybe I was held up at work – I can’t: I will comfortably skip the workout and head straight home for dinner.

Popular self-help culture often confuses the two, and promotes the idea that we can convert every routine into a habit, and lead a better life on autopilot.

Unfortunately, this is not simple, and often impossible – leading to frustration, when we tend to skip activities that requires effort (exercising, cleaning dishes).

Exercising will never be a habit with me – I need to consciously bring myself to a work out. However, there are tricks from psychology and neuroscience that can help us overcome the inertia.

Workflows for building sophisticated success systems

A workflow is much more effortful, it involves multiple steps / processes. It requires deliberate planning to design a workflow and considerable effort to execute the workflow. Often the workflow spans multiple days and may include multiple collaborators.

To write a blog post, you need to

• Select a topic of interest to you and your readers
• Research the topic
• Analyze the research, synthesize a structure
• Write and edit, striving for clarity of thought and expression, readability and interest
• Create and insert pictures, videos, and other rich multimedia
• Build links to refer to internal and external work
• Refine the blog post for search-engine optimization, add the appropriate tags and meta descriptions

If you are to write 50 blog posts, then you need to create a blog creation workflow (see the more elaborate 5-step blogging system that I execute every day or 2 days) that consists of steps that can be executed over a time period, systematically.

For example, if you can design this workflow to execute in a week, you can write 50+ blog posts over the year. If you can refine and improve the system to do 2 blog posts a week, you could write 100+ blog posts a year!

Workflows can become increasingly complex and sophisticated. They can include short-term projects, embedded workflows and processes, and collaboration with other participants and teams.

Improving our success systems

As we execute our systems, we gain proficiency and often we are able to 1) streamline our systems to function much more efficiently and effectively, and 2) try to make parts of these automatic – reducing our inertia and limbic friction (see Limbic Friction Blocking You? 3 Tips That Will Make You Act Now For Success!).

To improve automaticity, our focus is usually to move more towards routines and habits. Some routines may never become habits, but automating the first step in the routine to a habit may provide the impetus needed to start the routine.

Achieving long-term success by building effective systems for success

In How To Succeed In Life? By Building Systems For Success! we introduced our 7-step formula for success: a blueprint for success in life and the goals we undertake based on psychology and neuroscience.

Lasting change and enduring success need two critical pieces: a new identity and identity-based goals (as explained in How To Change Your Life For Better? Change Your Identity (in 3 Steps)! and a system for success (as explained in Why Systems Thinking Will Make You Successful In Life?).

This article described how to build a system for our identity-based outcome goals and for achieving long-term success. We are still faced with the action paradox – we may have the best systems in the world, but they are useless if we cannot bring ourselves to execute. The next article explores this in detail.