Goal and System

Set systems to guide our actions and decisions in life, not goals.

Three years ago, I read on the internet about conducting a life review. There are many guides on the internet about how to do it. Each of them has unique elements and approaches, but they all share a common practice: to set goals.

I have been doing such review religiously every quarter. My format is different every time, which depends on which internet guide I am following at that time. Nevertheless the gist is the same. I want to know (1) where I am at, (2) whither I want to go, and (3) why I want to go there.

I have just finished my twelve review for 2022 Q4. A gut feeling came to me that I shouldn’t try to define any goal this time. It is not that I don’t have outcomes that I want to achieve. It is that goal is not a good format to capture things happening on the life level.

Goal

Traditional wisdom teaches us to set SMART goals. It works very well for something happening on a microscopic level, for example, I want to finish reading this chapter in this book today, or I want to leave my house today to jog for 5 km. It is so unambiguous and workable that you kind of know whether you can make it beforehand. It serves very well as a source of motivation on this concrete level.

However, setting 3-month-long goals can be unproductive, or even counterproductive. In particular, it has some issues to apply goal-setting as a method for larger pieces in life:

• The format forces oversimplification of the whole picture. Different aspects of life aren’t independent from each other. Goals often fail to help track progress across aspects.
• The format limits outcomes that we are tracking. Human are bad at predicting how we will feel about things. Goals do not help track other possible outcomes that we might have in these 3 months, before we even know what we would feel like.
• The format is unhelpful in guiding actions. Goals can be either specific like a SMART one, or an abstract and loose one. For the former, seldom do things happen linearly in life and does not guide actions effectively; for the latter, it is often vague and thus fails to show our concrete progress and what we need to do.

System

So what should we do instead? A realisation came to me in my latest review is that I need to think of life in terms of system, inspired by Ray Dalio’s book Principles.

In essence, a system is a set of rules. We usually refer it with different names on different levels of personal life: routines, habits, principles or values. A system is something that you adhere to when you do things or make decisions, big or small.

We usually use this concept on something on a group or society level, for example, the trend to use predefined rules (or even automated systems, like computers) to assist group decision making. It is a response towards an increasingly complex societal structure.

Human instinct was once a good system. It helped our ancestors adapt the nature. In the modern society, our Palaeolithic brains no longer helps us make the best action or judgement. Our impulses, emotions and tendencies fail to meet up with the requirements of our time.

You don’t control flood by changing the nature of water; you dig channels.

Two Remarks Regarding System

Setting Up System. There are many internet guides on setting different levels of systems mentioned above. So I won’t try to put up a guide here. As everyone has his/her brain wired differently, I believe that you will have to find one that clicks for you.

System and Outcome. Thinking in system instead of goal doesn’t mean that we just focus on process but not results. It is a false dichotomy. The relation between process and result can confuse a lot, but they are not mutually exclusive. We have to evaluate our systems based on its outcomes. However, ultimately we would want to optimise the system, not the outcome, because it is the system that produces the outcome.