“Systems vs. Goals” is silly (2019)
malcolmocean.com
malcolmocean.com
What a strange post. This guy namedrops Scott Adams and writes a few lines referencing Adams' 2013 book How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big, but it's pretty unclear to me if he understood the point that Adams was trying to make. In Ch6 Goals vs Systems, Adams writes:
> To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time... The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Looking at the blog post author's emboldened claim, "Systems don't work without goals", and his implication that every olympic athlete who does not claim his or her medal emoji is a failure, it seems clear to me that he either missed Adams' point entirely or has his own agenda with respect to "goals" as a buzzword. I will also point out that the project that his blog links to is a $10/month subscription service that itself functions as a system to help people achieve their goals -- so perhaps this is someone who has a vested interest in this semantic battle.
Well detected! Yes, I do have an financial interest in this semantic battle. I haven't read Scott Adams' whole book but I found myself called to respond to his take when people were rejecting my app or my other writing and just citing "goals are for losers". So yeah, I'm critiquing a straw man here—Adams' thinking is deeper than that, but the people quoting him seemed to just have a naive anti-goals slogan.
Even prior to starting the app though, goal-setting had changed my life in a really meaningful way, and I would still have taken issue with "goals are for losers" as a blanket statement. Most people don't realize that it's possible to just decide to do something and work towards it, and goal-setting can be a really powerful frame for that.
I would say that I'm not the one calling the other Olympic athletes losers—Scott Adams does that in his book and I'm responding to him. Goals are for everybody.
Anyway, Adams is making some good points (goals and systems are different, and presuccess failure is a real issue) but he's also overgeneralizing—it is, in fact, possible to have goals without having presuccess failure. Goals can feel good at every turn. Which I won't go into further here because I made my case in the post already.
Looking at your ideas, I think it's clear why that's the case. Goals need to be treated in a very specific way in order to avoid pitfalls. Is it really worth recommending goals when you need so many guard rails to prevent bad outcomes? Guard rails that you are willing to provide, for a fee $.
This lines up with my experience too. I've seen people self-sabotage because they're not on track to make X amount of money in 5 years. I just don't think goals naturally lead to better outcomes than systems.
I think this is true for companies too. It's better to create systems and culture that better serve the customer than to fixate on stock price, profit, or beating quarterly earnings.
By the expansive definition of goal, sure, I have goals. But that’s not what I think about. I think about promises I have made; people I care about; experiences I enjoy; problems I want to solve.
Yes you could find goals here, but the reason I don’t think about that is that I immediately feel like I am playing an empty, meaningless game whenever goals enter the conversation. Goals seem to displace agency. Every moment I make choices, not “because I have a goal” but for a host of other kinds of reasons. I suppose you could say that goals for me are like local temporary variables. Why focus on them?
In this vein, there's a good quote from Elon Musk in Everyday Astronaut's interview with him at Starbase: "A guided missile is going in the wrong direction at any given point in time, but it course-corrects.
You don't want to be a super precise cannonball when you don't even know where the target is."
Goals have a tendency to rot away the very things that lead you to success.
Which is right. You can't develop useful atomic habits without knowing their intended use.