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Brian kicks off a series of videos about James Clear’s terrific book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

Goals or systems?

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I wanted to talk about this is kind of an initial look at the Atomic Habits book by James Clear. If you haven’t caught this book before, I gave kind of a general review yesterday.

Today, I wanted to go into the kind of the first chapter and some of the things that really stood out for me.

He talks a lot about compounding and the compound effect, which also a great book out there, Compound Effect by Darren Hardy deals with a similar idea of how how habits really compound over time.

It doesn’t go in a straight linear line of improvement, it has a has very much a lagging result, here’s that here’s a picture of the plateau of latent potential.

This is you know, where you see what actually happens versus what we all think should happen. That if you’re especially if you’re doing the exact same thing day after day after day, let’s say you’re dealing with a daily habit, then it would seem like it would just gradually work its way up.

An improvement would be be able to be seen pretty quickly.

But in reality, improvement takes forever to be visual at all. And and then it slowly ramps up, and then eventually it’ll take off. It goes way beyond what you think is even possible early on. But let’s I want to get into the section on goals.

So he talks about goals versus systems. And this is really good stuff. Because it’s a lot of times we we over focus on goals as being the end all to what needs to happen. And really, goals are just foundational.

There’s something that needs to occur at some point, especially if you’re writing a business goals have to be in place somewhere. Because you got to you have to have everyone on the same side, you have to have everyone go in the same direction, you got to know, you know, even in soccer, the goal is the place where you’re kicking the ball to it’s the goal, that’s where we’re headed.

If you don’t know that, it’s really easy to start kicking the ball in the wrong direction, because there’s at least three other directions you can be kicking it in. So let’s it’s not as important, he spent some time saying that goals aren’t important at all.

And I disagree. I disagree with that.

But he then goes back and and discusses what he means by that. But he is trying to break people out of that goal mentality is as the goal being the thing, the goal is not the thing, the goal is the beginning of the thing, and then you got to build a system to back it up.

So this is a great piece when he’s talking about the different problems that are associated with goals.

He says achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement, we think we need to change our results.

But the results are not the problem.

What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.

When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the system’s level, fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves.

This is this matters both personally and if you’re working with any type of organization, including a business that really does matter a lot, understanding the importance of the systems being the thing, that this is a thing that I come into contact over and over again, with business owners, where they don’t see the importance of systems, especially if they’re very outgoing.

And they have a very spontaneous attitude about things and they like to, you know, keep things nice and loose then systems seem like they’re fighting against that when in reality they they can help promote that in the long time.

A systems first mentality provides the antidote, when you fall in love with the process rather than the product.

You don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.

You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you envision.

I also love this line you you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. This is it’s difficult to talk about and it’s difficult to think about but if you could realize that the that he talks about the trajectory is more important than than the endgame than where you’re going.

It matters whether you’re you’ve switched things on a regular basis.

And if you can do that, if you just switch things by a small percentage It’s like you said 1% improvement over time.

If you could do that, that makes a big difference over time that compounds and it doesn’t take that much willpower to do, especially if you’re dealing with personal, personal issues that you’re trying to trying to fix or make better.

So it’s just another piece of this atomic habits book. It’s difficult to discuss. He does it better than me trying to explain what he said, so be made sure you get a copy of the book, I’m, I don’t get any pay. I don’t get any kickback for promoting this book. It’s just a it’s one of those books that makes such a big difference.

I think if you’re in the right frame of mind, and you’re looking to make improvements and you’re not sure how the if you get stuck, really getting from point A to point B, and you’re not quite sure how to get yourself there.

This is a good book for that.

Also my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business I do get a kickback from these, but I don’t charge very much for him. It’s a it’s a short book nine ways to Amazon proof your business you can get them wherever books are sold, and honestly, I’ll give it away for free too.

So if you want a digital copy, you go to my website, AmazonProofBook.com and sign up for a free digital copy. That’s all I have for tonight.

You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.