People overwhelmingly think they’re smarter, stronger, more industrious and better looking than they really are. To some extent, this is healthy. If most of us realized how ugly and dumb we really were, we’d have trouble leaving the house, landing a job, and scoring a mate. But it hurts us when we want to accomplish something. We set ourselves up for failure by setting poor goals.
The most successful people I know do set large, ambitious goals for themselves, but they realize that they’re lazy, weak, and dumb. They realize that simply saying to themselves “I’m going to lose 30 pounds in 3 months” is never going to work. So instead, they set goals as endpoints, but they use systems to achieve those goals. They decide, in advance, that they will go to the gym from 6:00 – 7:00 every weekday. They decide that every morning they will have one egg and one spinach smoothie, and every evening they will have one piece of fish with rice. They realize that amorphous goals will get them nowhere, so they set up a system they can stick with and let the results, for the most part, take care of themselves.
