Forget setting goals and commit to a process
Great article over at Entrepreneur magazine on why goals are overrated, and why we should replace them with systems:
If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week…
If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still get results?
…I just added up the total word count for the articles I’ve written this year. (You can see them all here.) In the last 12 months, I’ve written over 115,000 words. The typical book is about 50,000 to 60,000 words, so I have basically written two books this year.
All of this is such a surprise because I never set a goal for my writing. I didn’t measure my progress in relation to some benchmark. I never set a word count goal for any particular article. I never said, “I want to write two books this year.”
What I did focus on was writing one article every Monday and Thursday. And after sticking to that schedule for 11 months, the result was 115,000 words. I focused on my system and the process of doing the work. In the end, I enjoyed the same (or perhaps better) results.
This has always been the way I operate: I never had any kind of goal with my writing, only a daily routine that I followed. And the work just piles up over time.
betzistar
