Everyone who has read Atomic Habits by James Clear will recognise the quote in the title of this post. If you haven’t read the book it’s one I’d recommend to anyone.

It’s easy to come up with goal. You might even make some progress towards it during the initial rush of excitement when deciding to do something new. Unless you create some systems that could be as far as you get. So goals are most useful for pointing you towards the systems you need to set up.

You don’t need perfect systems to start. One feature of systematic work is you can update your processes as you learn. You have a feedback loop you can use to improve and speed up your progress.

Big goals are hard and take time. Attacking them systematically means you can focus on small parts at a time and make progress without getting overwhelmed.

It’s worth thinking about what goals you have right now, and seeing which ones have good systems behind them and which ones don’t.