to a job interview wants to get hired, so why is it that only one person gets the gold medal and only one person gets the job? The person who came second or third had the same goal, but they lost. What happened? The winner used the right system or strategy; the losers didn’t. GoALs Don’t LAST IF YOU DON’T CHANGE YOUR HABITS Your bedroom has looked like a bomb has hit it for the past two months, so you set a goal to tidy it up, which you do, but in two weeks’ time, it looks like a bomb has hit it again. Why? Because you have a bad habit of being untidy. You set a goal to lose 10 pounds, and you find enough motivation to go on a 30-day smoothie fast. You lose the weight, but in two months you’ve put it back on again. Why? Because you’ve got a bad habit of unhealthy eating. So, when the room gets messy again, and the weight returns, you’ ll be hoping to find the same level of motivation it took to do it the first time. This is a bad system and you will live your life continuously chasing outcomes if you don’t change it. There is no point in taking Tylenol every time you get a headache. The headaches keep coming back for a reason and all you are doing is treating the symptom and not the cause. The cause may be that you don’t drink enough water, and once you get into the habit of drinking enough water, the headaches will go away. When you solve problems at the level of the result, you only get a temporary outcome. Once you resolve the inputs, the outputs will resolve themselves. REACHING YOUR GOALS Puts A LIMIT ON YOUR HAPPINESS What do I mean by this? When you are on the other side of your goal you think, “If I could just reach that weight, I’d be happy,” “If I could just make enough money to buy a new house, I’d be happy.” Again, there is nothing wrong with these goals, but you are putting happiness off until you achieve the goal. You make happiness something that only the future version of yourself can enjoy. Additionally, goal setting creates an “either-or” conflict—you either achieve your goal and you’re a success, or you don’t and you’re a failure. Life is full of ups and downs. You may get to your destination by taking a completely different route than you had planned, and that different route might take a lot longer than you had anticipated. This doesn’t mean you are a failure, and neither does it mean that you can’t give yourself permission to be happy. The only solution to this problem is to work from a systems-based approach, and as long as your system is running, you have the right to be happy because you know you are