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I'm guessing that a system is just a repeatable goal. So perhaps in your case, the repeatable goal wouldn't be to lose weight as that would invariably lead you to dying, but rather to do something that makes you healthier every day. That could be something like eating healthier everyday or exercising for 15 minutes. This way you shifting from the goal of being X pounds lighter, to a system of being healthy.

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The beauty of a systems approach is that it takes vastly less willpower. It is very counter-intuitive to most people: "Gee, doing that every day, that sounds so hard. I can barely get exercise twice a week; therefore exercising every single day must be much harder." Nope. Quite the opposite.

Hard is deciding every day whether you feel like going for a walk by arguing with yourself over whether you will feel better afterwards. That is effort spent with no satisfying payoff.

True. As so often, Linux gives a great analogy. When you start using it chances are you find working with it pretty inefficient and many things seem hard.

But the more you learn about the system (which only really works when you do it every day)the better you get at solving your problems whereas people who rely solely on out-of-the box software improve rather little.

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