Habits Are The Wrong Thing To Focus On

This is a really tricky and highly misunderstood nuance to personal development. Ask any thought leader what the most important thing is related to achieving a goal, getting results, or making progress in your life and they’ll all say the same thing: Consistency.

When you take action consistently you maximize your ability to nudge reality in the direction you want it to go. Consistency compounds so that small nudges become major shifts and your life becomes unrecognizable in the best of ways.

Consistency is also something many people struggle with, so it’s a highly effective intervention to introduce. The narrative is that if you were to be more consistent, your life would be better.  I believe that’s true.

What naturally stems from this argument is an obsession with habits, and rightfully so, because habits are consistent actions. Any thought leader would agree that you need to have good habits if you want to be successful.

This gets people focusing on the wrong things, which is building habits. But they’re putting energy in the wrong places. Habits are the outcome, not the input. Consistent action isn’t the byproduct of building up an action itself, but rather engineering the environment and systems behind the action. 

There is an underlying system for everything that we do. The quality of that system determines how efficiently, effectively, and consistently we follow through on a given action. Habits are the wrong thing to focus on… The best use of your time, energy, attention, and brilliance is to focus on improving the systems around a given action.

Better system = More consistent action = Better habits.  That’s the true order of operations.

But how do you build better systems? It’s all about the process around taking action. Outlining a more specific procedure improves a system. Thinking through how, when, and where an action is meant to happen is part of the system.  Consolidating effort so that there’s less waste and more leverage comes from a better system.

You want to reach out to a family member more often? Tell them you’ll call at 1pm on Fridays. It’s a better system that leads to it happening more consistently than trying to remember to do it. Want to make sure your partner feels extra special and loved? Write down the night before the one thing you’ll plan to do, which will work way better than trying to figure out what would be meaningful in the moment.

Both things I just shared are examples of real systems I’ve incorporated into my life to be more consistent with what matters most to me… And I have many more examples of systems that I’ve put together for you. I actually have videos overviewing them if you want to watch them here!

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