Everyone has goals.
Maybe you want to lose 20 pounds in time for summer.
Perhaps you want to land a promotion at work.
Or maybe you hope to learn how to play your favorite song on guitar by the end of the year.
Regardless of what it is, you probably have a few goals you’re striving for in various domains of your life.
However, in recent years, the conversation around productivity has shifted toward the importance of systems over goals.
The thought is that building systems streamlines your path to success.
Systems let you create processes that you simply have to follow in order to go in the right direction.
They’re like maps to completing a task or hitting a goal.
For a concrete example of a system, think about how your average commuter car is built.
They don’t build each and every car by hand, having to decide which part to build first with every new vehicle.
No — the cars are built on a factory line, following a very specific system.
On the other hand, goals are like fixed milestones you use to measure your progress.
You either pass your goal, or you don’t reach it.
Now, with so much emphasis on systems, some people believe that goals are actually useless.
As long as you continually refine your systems, you’ll get everything you want in life.
Or so they believe.
Is that true? Are systems really more important?
Well, systems are a vital piece of the puzzle…
But they don’t warrant throwing out the concept of goals entirely.
You see, if you ditch goals, you won’t have any sense of what improvement means.
You won’t be able to improve your system if you don’t have a way to define “improvement.”
Renders the whole “improving my system” part useless.
This is where goals play a part.
If you alter your system and reach your goal faster or with fewer resources, you know for sure that your changes were legitimate improvements.
On top of that, goals give you some sort of constraint to work against.
They force you to adapt to reach success faster.
For example, you might start a fitness routine to get in shape. You lift weights 3 times a week and cycle every day.
If you’re not striving for any target, though, you might never get in the shape you hope for.
You won’t push yourself in your workouts hard enough to hit those goals.
However, if you say “I want to lose X weight by Y date” or “I want to bench press X pounds by Y date,” well, now you’re pushing yourself to hit those goals on time.
All while following your exercise routine, aka your “system.”
Lastly, goals also offer you satisfaction and a chance to reward yourself for your hard work.
Sure, the satisfaction fades not long after you reach your goal — but if you have your system in place, you can continue upward towards the next one.
So overall: striving for goals without systems in place is inefficient.
But following a system without having any sort of goals gets you to do the bare minimum, sometimes making no progress at all.
Combine them, though, and you have a recipe for success.
Now, if we’re talking trading, I’ve got the perfect system for you: my BEP passive profits trading system.
If you’ve got money goals this year, BEP could be just the system that carries you to them.