Setting Goals Or Having A System

Setting goals, an old and popular practice

Setting goals could be the most popular technique to get good at something. Think about it. I am sure most of you are at least familiar with how schools work. First, there are different levels of school: primary school, elementary school, high school, college. Then, within each one, there are different grades. And finally, within each grade, there are different goals. The completion of one goal is required to move up to the next level. Although we might not realize it, this succession of goals can have a very positive effect on students: it keeps them motivated to go to the next level. The nature of the motivation, of course, differs depending on the student. Some will see going to the next step as an achievement and enjoy the journey. Some others just want to be done with school and therefore going to the next step means getting closer to the end. Regardless, students have long-term goals that are broken down into smaller and successive goals, and the accomplishment of each one keeps them motivated as they progress.

This system is also used outside of school. If you are learning a new language, chances are that someone recommended you a series of exams to take. Are you learning a musical instrument? Your teacher probably prepared some milestones to hit. Are you studying programming? Chances are that you have identified areas you want to get started on. Programming is a very wide domain and you need to get started somewhere after all. Martial arts have belts of different colors that are supposed to represent different levels of mastery.

Setting goals keeps you motivated

When it comes to getting good at something, it is very important to build good habits that optimize your chances of reaching your goals. It is common knowledge that getting good at something does not happen overnight. It requires serious and consistent practice. But we are not machines and we need something to keep us going. That fuel can take different forms, the most powerful of all being motivation. But what is motivation? Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

Motivation is what explains why people or animals initiate, continue or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior.

Human beings are lazy by nature. When we are given choices, we instinctively go for the easiest option. When it comes to sticking to good habits, we are constantly facing a very simple choice: do it or not. Let us say you want to get ripped and you decided to work out every day. When comes the time of your work out, you will be facing a choice: should I workout or not? And your brain will push for the easiest option. If you are already doing something effortless such as watching TV, your brain will push for you to keep watching TV, it will not push you to go to the gym. That is where motivation comes into play. If you are motivated to work out, going to the gym will not feel like a lot of effort to go through and your brain will be less likely to play against you.

Motivation is a powerful ally, but there is no such thing as free lunch. Motivation needs to be fed. For that, we are all equipped with something called the reward system. The reward system is a pretty complex topic in itself, but let us stick to this over-simplified definition: it makes us feel good when we accomplish something. And that pleasant feeling is what feeds motivation. Here is how we can leverage our reward system:

1. You need to take actions towards your goal; you consume motivation to make it feel close to effortless, making it easier to do
2. You take action and accomplish your goal
3. Your reward system makes you feel good about it, which refills your stock of motivation
4. You are up to your next goal
5. Back to step 1.

Yes, this system is a loop! Therefore, as long as you have goals to feed that loop, you will keep moving forward. Very powerful, isn’t it?

As for the entry points to this loop, I can see two:

• you already have an initial amount of motivation and you go straight to step 1
• you do not have initial motivation; in that case, you need to push yourself a bit to achieve something (step 2), which should trigger your reward system, create motivation and start the engine

Now that we understand the benefits of motivation, let us have a look at another important benefit of settings goals.

Setting goals encourages scoped progressions

Good goals are scoped ones. You clearly identify where you want to arrive as well as all the steps needed to get there. And although it may sound obvious, it has very powerful advantages.

First of all, it sets a focus. This is especially useful when your goals are related to a very broad domain. Let us use the example of making a simple website using web programming languages. Programming is a very broad domain with a lot of interconnected concepts. In your journey of making a website, you are very likely to encounter other topics that are closely related to your goal, but outside of its scope. Your goal may be limited to learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but you are very likely to run into situations that require you to study how web browsers work internally, or what happens between a web browser and a remote server. And it can be easy to fall into rabbit holes that would take your focus away from your initial goals.
That being said, it is not all bad. On the contrary, it gives you exposure to things you did not know nor expected. It is a new food for your end goals. Although it is recommended not to deep dive into those unexpected topics so you can keep your focus on your initial goals, you can still take notes of them and later on, incorporate them into goals you already have, or even make them their own goal.

Before jumping to the next advantage of scoping goals, I would like to discuss how hard it can be to start doing something.
Try to remember the last time you had to do something tedious. It could be tidying your room, going to the gym, washing the dishes, or anything else. Now, try to identify the moment where you felt discouraged the most. I bet it was when you realized you had to do that thing. Re-using the previous examples:

• you felt more discouraged when you realized your room was a mess than when you were actually tidying it
• you felt more discouraged when you saw in your calendar that you need to go to the gym in 5 minutes than when you were on the bench press doing reps
• you felt more discouraged when you saw your sink full of unwashed dishes than when you were actually washing the dishes

In short, when it comes to doing something you do not want to do and/or are not motivated to do, getting started is much harder than actually doing it. You realize all the efforts you will have put in to get that thing done and it is not fun at all.
The situation is actually similar when you tackle broad domains. There are a lot of interconnected concepts, how could you know where to start if you are not familiar with it in the first place? It can be quite overwhelming, can’t it? Having scoped goals can help us with that. It shows us a rather simple entry point into something quite complex. Back to our goal of building a website, if I ask you to build a website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you know that you should probably start by looking into these technologies and how to make a website using them. On the other hand, if I just ask you to study programming, identifying where to start becomes much harder doesn’t it?
It is in our interest to make starting something as easy as possible. And breaking down big goals into smaller and scoped goals helps with that.

But you must have enough of good quality goals

Although setting goals is a deadly weapon when it comes to getting good at something, it also has limits we need to be aware of.
Goals are actually a double-edged sword. And to avoid cutting yourself, you need to ask yourself these 2 questions:

• Do you have enough goals to keep going long enough?
• Are your goals challenging enough?

Quality and quantity. Your goals are what paves the way for you. You need to make sure you have enough of them in reserve to keep you going, and you also need to make sure your goals are challenging enough to get you out of your comfort zone. This is yet another topic that would deserve its own article, but in short: you will not make significant progress if you do not go out of your comfort zone. Not making significant progress is in itself something we want to avoid. But it also has an impact on our motivation: the smaller your progress is, the smaller the motivation you get in return from your reward system will be.

You also need to know what to target when you set goals. Let us use an example again. Let us say you want to get faster at typing on your computer keyboard. You can currently type up to 65 words per minute and you want to get to 80 words per minute. You make it your goal to reach that number and you decide to practice with speed typing tests every day. But what if, more than the lack of practice, your technique is actually what is slowing you down? You may reach 80 words per minute with practice, but the imperfections in your form will remain and may prevent you from reaching 100 words per minute. Therefore, rather than aiming at being able to type 80 words per minute, you should probably prioritize practicing touch typing and improve your technique. This is a good example of why setting quality goals can be crucial and make a significant difference.

As for the quantitative aspect (having enough goals), you basically need to have an endless list of goals. Mastering something has no end. Out of all the people considered masters in their domain I have seen, I cannot remember a single person who claimed they had nothing left to learn. True mastery has no end and I am willing to bet that any master would agree.

Goals are temporary victory

Above, we explained the motivational aspect of achieving a goal. But this can be a double-edged sword depending on the type of person you are. There are mainly two types of people: those who accomplish a given goal and cannot wait to get started on the next one, and those who call it off for a while after achieving a goal. The latter is unfortunately a trap easy to fall into. Plus, the more you wait to get back into something, the harder it gets to start again. Therefore, although you may feel tempted to take a short break after achieving a goal, I would recommend getting started on the next one immediately. Slowing down the pace is acceptable though; you just finished a sprint for your previous goal and you may need to breathe a little. That is okay. The important is not to stop.

Having a system

Having a system is an alternative solution to setting goals that addresses some of the caveats mentioned above. With a system, you do not define any concrete milestones. Instead, you identify what you want to accomplish in the long run. For example, if your goal is to get better at speaking English, you may set goals such as getting 780 points at the TOEIC or giving a presentation in English at work next week. With a system, getting better at English is your only goal; you organize your life and habits around it and acknowledge the fact that it is an eternal process that will never end. You would switch your phone and computer to English, consume media in English, make friends who speak English, etc. Maybe you are not capable of watching movies in English yet? It is okay. Switch the movie back to a language you understand and try again in 3 months.
Having a system focuses on long-term goals and continuous efforts. In a sense, it goes in the opposite direction of setting goals. The main benefits of having a system over setting goals are the following ones:

• no reliance on having goals available. By following a system, you target goals that cannot be accomplished. That is on purpose. With a system, you are aiming at mastery, and as written above, mastery has no end, it is an eternal process.
• no risk of calling it off for a while upon achievement, since there are no milestones.
• encourages small, progressive, and continuous efforts. When you have big milestones defined, your focus is on them. Things are different when you follow a system. You identify directions you want to follow and you orientate your life around them. Your wins are not the achievements of those big milestones. Your wins are much smaller but much more frequent. Using the example of getting good at English again, your win is not getting 800 points at the TOEIC; your win is understanding that to be badass has no relation with bad buttocks. Sure, wins such as the former are much bigger, but the latter happens much more often. And although getting 800 points at the TOEIC may seem like a more significant achievement, it is actually the contrary and I am going to explain why.

The importance of 1%

The idea is simple (I stole it from the book Atomic habits by James Clear):

• break down what you are trying to get good at into the smallest possible fragments
• improve every single one by 1% every day

This produces incredible results in the long run. Let us just do the maths:

• you get better by 1% each day
• there are 365 days in a year
• getting better by 1% means multiplying your current performance by 1.01
• 1.01 * 1.01 * … * 1.01 = 1.01 ^ 365 = 37.783434332887159

In other words, if you can get 1% better every single day, you will end up being 37.78 times better after a year. 37.78 times!

Most of us underestimate the importance of this 1%. After all, it is not even noticeable. Let us say you can do 20 push-ups in a row. Getting better by 1% each day means that it would take you 5 days to reach the count of 21 push-ups. It is nothing at all, isn’t it? Now, if I tell you that it will get you from 20 push-ups to close to 90 within 5 months, do you still think 1% each day is nothing?

Of course, there are cases where the progression is not exponential. If we blindly apply these numbers to the above example, it means that you should be able to do 755 push-ups after a year of training. I am not saying it is impossible, but it surely is a big number.
The point is not to give hard numbers here, it is to illustrate an important aspect of making small but continuous improvements: they do not just add up, they compound.

Having a system has flaws as well

We have seen that having a system addresses some flaws in setting goals. But setting goals also has benefits over having a system. The main two are:

1. you need to stay motivated
2. it is hard to get started when the domain is broad

Following a system encourages small and consistent achievements. This has undeniable benefits that we explained above. But these small achievements are unfortunately sometimes not enough to trigger our reward system and therefore to keep us motivated in the long run. With a system, one needs to find other ways to stay motivated. It is a problem that James Clear calls the valley of disappointment in his book Atomic Habits. This would also deserve its own article, and that is actually what my friend Guillaume Hansali did with this article.
Being conscious that the small wins contribute to a much bigger goal is one way, but it does not necessarily work for everybody. Making these small wins obvious is another way. For example, let us say you want to become healthy and completely cut sweets from your diet. Instead of just congratulating yourself each time you resist the temptation of eating sweets, you could put the money you would have used for it in a jar. Once the jar is full, you could use that money to go on a small trip or to a good restaurant. Seeing the jar filling up may be a trigger for your reward system and may feed your motivation.
Everybody is different and every situation can have its own workarounds to trick your brain into triggering your reward system. There is no magic formula and you need to figure out workarounds for every single case. This is one limit of having a system, compared with setting concrete goals.

Another limit of having a system is when it comes to approaching wide domains. We explained it above: approaching broad and complex domains is hard. Having a system does not provide us with ways to address that.

Should I set goals or should I have a system?

As always, the answer is: it depends. It depends on the kind of person you are. It depends on what you are trying to get good at. It depends on many factors. If you are a person who has difficulties staying motivated for something, then having a system may not be for you. On the contrary, if you are one of those who can stay motivated and disciplined once they have long-term goals in mind, then having a system can do wonders.

One important thing to note: the two are not exclusive. They can complete each other. Let us take Japanese martial arts as an example. I cannot count the number of times I witnessed people seeing having a black belt as a sign of mastery. “This guy has a black belt in karate, he’s no joke”. In Japanese, the rank black belt is also referred to as 初段 (pronounced shodan). It literally means initial step. In other words, the black belt is not an accomplishment, it is the beginning of the actual journey. It is the mark that you have acquired all the basics you need to get started at actually studying the art. You usually start with a white belt and make your way up to the black belt. There may be colors in between, depending on the art and perhaps the country. To get the next belt, there are expectations that you must fulfill. It is only once you have reached the black belt that you get more freedom as for how you study the art (generally speaking; I am sure it differs depending on the schools). I find it to be a good example of combining setting goals and having a system. Studying martial arts involves way too many things and it is very difficult to know where to start. The expectations for each belt are there to pave the way for you. They are your milestones. Once you have reached the black belt, that is where you have acquired enough skills to continue the journey on your own. And that is where you can switch to following a system.

The case of martial arts is just one example. There certainly are occasions where you can start with having a system, and also occasions where you can keep setting goals forever. As written above, it always depends. What is important is to know the tools available for you, as well as their pros and their cons. Based on that and on a good understanding of yourself (being aware of your own strengths and weaknesses), you should now be able to pick the right tool for the right situation.

References

Although the big part of this article is the result of personal thoughts and experiences, I can’t close this article without recommending reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I borrowed some concepts from there for this article, so it deserves credits.

I would also recommend this article on note-taking from my friend Guillaume Hansali. Although it is not directly related to the topic of this article, there are some overlaps and approaching having a system from Guillaume’s angle should be interesting in my opinion.