Designing Success: 4 Ways Strategy Shapes Our Habits at All Levels
Building systems means choosing who we want to become
“Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
—Jim Rohn
Like many part-time creators, my biggest writing challenge has been developing a daily writing habit.
I struggled to write consistently before generating the content that got me invited to speak on podcasts and at conferences.
I’ll break down the strategies that have helped me construct a writing habit that has produced hundreds of pieces of content alongside my full-time job and active family life while still maintaining my health and fitness.
Choosing better
My approach to developing and sustaining my writing habit hinges on seeing strategy as a powerful set of choices.
Those choices can help us take back control of the actions we usually repeat without thinking.
Regardless of the habit we’re trying to develop, these strategies can help us simplify and regain control of our lives and productivity. This can change our destiny from the personal level up through the teams, products, and companies we’re part of.
Done consistently, we can set the stage for longer-term success and impact.
Goals aren’t enough
I failed to develop a writing habit because I tried too many “hacks” and set short-term, small goals.
When trying to create any new habit, whether writing, going to the gym, or meditating, we frequently start by setting overly optimistic, low-level goals to accomplish them.
And then we wonder why we aren’t making more progress.
“Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.”
Achievement means we have to go beyond hoping things will get better.
When I’ve done less writing, I’ve sat on the sidelines and read other people’s work, wondering how they could write so consistently with such a high level of quality. I knew I had to make a change.
I had to go beyond setting small goals to write for 20 or 30 minutes on random days. I had to set up my system to make writing the regular, obvious, and natural choice.
The most encouraging breakthrough is that we can engineer success by making better choices and taking control of our habits and systems.
At the core of this is understanding the importance of crucial moments.
The Power of Decisive Moments
“Life is made up of choices made at decisive moments. …the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking. …Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments….These choices are a fork in the road.”
–Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (p. 160). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Life is a constant stream of forking moments, where one choice leads to and massively impacts the next.
James Clear has a brilliant mental model that lays out just how closely related good and bad choices are and how quickly they result in good or bad days.
One or two key moments really can swing the momentum either way:
“FIGURE 14: The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day and can ultimately lead to very different outcomes.”
– Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (p. 161). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The secret to happier, more fulfilled lives is taking control of these decisive moments and consciously deciding to not let them “happen” to us.
Use or be used
When we aren’t in the driver’s seat, we let ourselves get hijacked by things that turn us into the “product.”
Habit-forming but empty junk food, media consumption that plays on our fears and outrage us, or social media apps that channel the same anxieties and anger and turn us over time into depressed, suicidal shells of our potential.
Small wonder the surgeon general wants warning labels added to them.
Taking back our power
Whatever habit we’re trying to create, the breakthrough is we don’t have to let these moments just happen to us, leaving us vulnerable to other people’s agendas.
We can take back control and make better choices through four key insights:
The flow from Choices >> Habits >> Systems
How Habits impact Identity (and vice versa)
What Procrastination is telling us
The Power of Big Goals
1. The flow from Choices >> Habits >> Systems
“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”
The choices we make regularly become our habits. Setting up an environment to consistently support those habits becomes a system.
When we consciously force our minds to make countless choices that go against the thousands of other things competing for our attention, we encounter friction and get beaten down by decision fatigue.
Scheduling our habits and using systems to tilt our environment in our favor allows us to form new habits and make better choices easily.
One of the most powerful for me in writing has been Dickie Bush’s concept of “Sacred Hours.”
As Dickie shows, it’s finding the time when we’re at our highest-functioning mentally, and we’re able to be the least responsive to our families and existing obligations.
Consistently accessing Sacred Hours is how Dickie went from financial professional to startup founder and full-time writer, and full-time lawyer John Grisham became a successful author.
When I officially rebooted my writing journey in late 2021, the morning “Sacred Hours” allowed me to maintain a more consistent writing schedule.
Establishing a schedule helps me score daily small “wins” that make me feel I’ve already achieved success by 8:00 a.m. every morning.
This has allowed me to create a new sense of myself and what I’m capable of.
2. How Habits impact Identity (and vice versa)
“Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.”
– Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (p. 40). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The total of the countless small forking choices we make every day, at every moment, built up over time, gradually create our sense of who we are, expressed in a simple phrase:
“I’m the kind of person who…”
Casting better votes
“Every action we take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity.”
– James Clear
This is why habits are so crucial. They are tiny votes we cast that make us a certain type of person.
But as James Clear also points out, identity can be a double-edged sword that cuts both ways…
Your identity can hold you back:
-I'm terrible with directions.
-I have a sweet tooth.
-I'm bad at math.
...or build you up:
-I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.
-I finish what I start.
-I read every day.
Build habits that reinforce your desired identity.
And this is the foundation: choosing to build our desired identity.
3. What Procrastination is telling us
One of the biggest enemies on our journey is choosing to do things that detract from our chosen path or procrastination.
Procrastination starts a cycle where we know we’re doing what we shouldn’t but can’t stop ourselves. This can spiral into feeling bad about ourselves. If we can instead see procrastination as a signal, we can recognize it as it’s happening and treat ourselves with more acceptance.
Procrastination is telling us that our identity hasn’t yet caught up with the higher-level strategies, systems, or goals we hope to achieve.
The key is not to beat ourselves up but to listen and adjust our system, strategy, and approach.
Don’t pretend it isn’t there
Accepting that procrastination will happen is the first step.
A powerful way to recover when we do fall off our daily routine is to avoid missing more than two days of our chosen habit. With the pull of my family, full-time job, and daily workout schedule, it’s easy to let these things expand to take over and rationalize later that we “had” to do them anyway.
Follow the schedule
Again, scheduling and “time-boxing,” together with laying out everything we might need ahead of time, are essential. This makes it easy to stay on track with our priority habits at the right time and outsmart procrastination.
Regardless of how much we might “feel like it,” when we schedule the work and work the schedule, we can watch the momentum build towards our goals.
But setting the right kind of goals can make the difference.
4. The Power of Big Goals
As we mentioned earlier, we usually start with low-level goals or “hacks.”
Whether we achieve them once or twice in the short term, if we don’t set goals consistent with our identity, they'll constantly get sabotaged.
This is the worst form of hoping, and why so few people can achieve and sustain success.
“Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.”
When we distinguish short-term goals, like:
“I’m going to go to the gym tomorrow.”
And instead, set higher-level, longer-term goals, like:
”I am building a new way of integrating health and wellness into my daily routine.”
These longer-term goals may not be where we see ourselves today, but they are a natural part of the new identity we’re working to become:
“I’m the kind of person who makes regular exercise a part of their life.”
Thinking big
The key is to start with big, hairy, audacious goals (”BHAG”) that are just out of reach based on our current reality.
Magic happens when we design systems that take us toward our goals in small ways and encourage us to improve continuously over time. This involves designing our personal strategies and building the habits and systems to bring them to life, one step at a time.
From being unknown, my consistent writing habit has led to being invited to speak at conferences, being featured on podcasts, and several rewarding coaching engagements.
But consistently achieving big things requires a new level of leadership.
Takeaways
Our lives represent the sum of the choices we make at decisive moments.
When we choose habits and build systems, we turn personal strategy into action.
Strategy allows us to move from unconscious and potentially counterproductive choices to intentional choices, propelling us toward improvement and our goals.
We can take control of our strategy in four key ways:
The flow from Choices >> Habits >> Systems
How Habits impact Identity (and vice versa)
What Procrastination is telling us
The Power of Big Goals
Harnessing the power of systems can help us make steady progress, improve, and achieve the kinds of goals that are a natural part of our new identities.
