Day 175 (A Hundred & Seventy-Five) of 365 days

Sharing your successes publicly may sound a bit narcissistic, but there’s a good reason to boast about your achievements. Studies have shown that publicly sharing your progress can help motivate you to accomplish your goals. Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals.

For many years, this was how I approached my habits too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the skills I want to learn, for the future I want to possess. I succeeded at some and failed too. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

Now for the interesting question: if you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? I think you would. The only way to win is to get better each day. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

If you don’t care about the opinion of whom you tell, it doesn’t affect your desire to persist — which is really what goal commitment is all about, you want to be dedicated and unwilling to give up on your goal, which is more likely when you share your progress with, someone, you look up to.

Sharing your goals with friends and regularly updating them about your progress boosts your chances of actually achieving them. It doesn’t matter whether there are stats to back that up or not – there will always be truth behind that statement.