For most of us, life is long. It seems short. It always feels that yesterday we were 10 years younger. Or we reminisce when our kids were small and the memory burns in our mind as if it was a week ago instead of a decade ago.
Our memory shapes this idea that life is short. We cut out so much of the mundane and capture vivid details of those weeks of travel, or holidays, or special events. We don’t waste precious memory for the boring routines. We don’t recall how many times we followed some ingrained habit.
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If you are building systems and habits in your life, you know the value of consistently taking action. One aspect that you will encounter is when the system that has a delay that seems harmless but is really destructive.
Delays in systems are normal. When you start exercising, you don’t see results related to your actions for a while. Instead, you have a pause. You keep working out and keep eating right but don’t see positive results.
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If you want to understand systems, you need to be able to spot patterns and structures. Business systems, government systems, etc. all have many systematic elements that drive their movement.
One easy way to see through the marketing lingo or the rhetoric is to follow the money. The money will tell you what is important. It will tell what direction that entity is headed.
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Most people want to improve. They want to get better. They want better health. They desire better financial security. They crave healthier relationships.
Often, it isn’t that we don’t want to improve. It is that we run out of capacity. We fill our days with everything else, all the tasks that we must do and responsibilities we need to track.
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Most people get enamored by the overnight success. They see someone go from rags to instant riches.
This shifts our perspective. We start to feel that the overnight success is more common than it is. We don’t realize when someone spent years working on their craft, we only see them turn into a smash hit, not the journey they took.
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The systems and habits approach to improvement is a great way to incorporate structure and habit in your life to help you become happy and successful.
By developing processes and routines and then following them, we can control the steps we take. Instead of relying on willpower, we rely on automatic behavior responses.
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When we use the systems and habits approach to improvement, we often build out new habits over months and even years. The goal is to build recurring behavior patterns that drive us to success.
This means that consistency is key. We must make sure we follow the steps in the same way for long enough for it to start to feel automatic.
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Systems thinking is a powerful mindset that can help shape your thoughts and actions throughout life. Instead of seeing one-off events, you see systems.
When I say systems, I don’t mean physical systems. Sure, there is a mechanical system that controls the temperature in my house. There is a physical system that is used to create your car. There is an engine system for your lawnmower.
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Systems and habits are powerful. If you are not designing your systems and habits, you are leaving your life to chance.
The odds are that many positive habits will be created during your lifetime. There are parents, teachers, coaches and friends who all help generate the mental models necessary to create those habits.
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The systems and habits approach to improvement is a powerful way to achieve happiness and success by redesigning our life. We take the daily routines and adjust them until they start to provide us with the prosperity and bliss we crave.
The key is consistency. We have to be consistent enough to take these adjustments and form new habits from them. Without habits we fall short. Willpower is fleeting and motivation hides when we need it most.
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If you want to know about a person, you should look at the systems and habits in their life. These will tell you where a person is going.
If they have the habit of eating right and exercising daily, they will likely move towards health. If they have the habit of eating fast food and watching TV for hours, they are likely moving away from health.
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Studying systems, I’ve learned how valuable they can be to solve problems. But a common misconception is that they are rigid and inflexible.
This idea comes from the fact that systems are often meant to maintain consistency. We design a system to accomplish a goal. The system keeps going and going trying to solve the problem the same way that we designed.
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Being a systems thinker, it is easy to get consumed by the mechanical parts of systems. There is an element that is perfectly logical.
But life isn’t as logical. Things happen that make sense. But things happen that don’t make sense. In fact, sometimes things happen that are heartless and cold and illogical.
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When using the systems and habits approach to improvement, we have to learn how to be patient. Improvement isn’t instant. We don’t wake up after one day of work with rewards and accomplishment.
Instead, it is a long, often grueling, process. We need to put in place the right systems and habits and then work those to ingrain them in our lives.
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Why is it that the enjoyable things in life and the things we should do in life seem worlds apart? Why can’t eating bacon cheeseburgers be healthy? Why doesn’t broccoli taste better if it is healthy for us?
It isn’t only food. Why isn’t sitting around relaxing better for our health? Instead, we have to work hard physically. We have to sweat. We have to breathe hard.
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Studying systems and habits for the past 20 years, I’ve learned the value of looking at the full systems and applying habit changes to our daily lives. It is more than breaking some bad habits. It is more than finding meaning behind our actions.
The benefit of working to instill positive habits is that we can make progress and improve our lives. When we stop making effort the only factor, we start to make real progress.
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Last Sunday my family decided to set up dominoes. We had a blast thinking up different structures to use. We use different marbles, blocks, tubes, etc. to create a series of reactions.
The more we played, the more I thought about the systems of life. Life isn’t as perfectly set up as the dominoes but in many ways follows the same pattern.
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I’ve worked with many great leaders. The best ones that I have had the pleasure of working alongside all have one characteristic in common.
They can see the bigger picture when problems arise. They remain calm and work through the problem, knowing that the best solution will come with strategic thought, not raw emotion.
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Being able to learn a lesson and then apply the newfound wisdom seems easy. It seems that we all should be able to do it.
But it is much easier said than done. While most of us hear about ways to better ourselves, we rarely apply the insight for the long term.
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Patterns are important. They help us to understand the world around us. We find the commonality in life and then determine what to expect.
If we get too caught up in the one-off, we ignore the patterns. We keep seeing past the lessons. We can’t make sense of things.
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