Systems to Success

Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

Atomic Habits, James Clear

How do you measure success? That’s a trickier question than it initially appears to be. In some sense, it really depends on where you are trying to define it in the first place.

A successful career may look very different from one person to the next. Perhaps that means you are in a high paying position in the business world, a top doctor in your field, a social worker who does their best day in and day out, a teacher who loves their students unconditionally and truly makes a difference in their lives. Success is defined differently in each of these cases.

What about in your personal life? Success for some means a loving relationship, for others it means peak physical fitness, still others would define it as happiness – whatever that may look like.

As read through Atomic Habits by James Clear (a great read that I highly recommend), he makes the case that success is about continual improvement. It’s about improving by 1% every day. Those little things add up over time. In order to make it a reality in our lives, we need systems to make them happen.

They don’t have to be complicated systems. It’s very easy to overcomplicate things. We think that life is hard, and so, we complicate things because we think difficult things require difficult solutions. That’s not always the case. Simple machines can accomplish a lot. A lever and pulley system can help a person lift significantly higher amount of weight than is possible without it. Simple systems can accomplish way more than we think. The same is true in our own lives. We just need some simple systems to make small adjustments that add up over time.

So, let me offer up a little challenge for you today. What is something that you can do that would cause you to claim success for your day? What is something that will make you 1% better as a person, for yourself, for your family, in your career, in your community? What will it take, today, to improve by 1%? Now… do it.