I've been seeing a lot of talk recently about goals being overrated, and you should prefer "systems" instead. On the one hand, I sympathize. A lot of goal-setting efforts are merely setting a target without clear means to achieve it.
However, I think it's also misleading to assume all progress comes from simple, slow incremental gains in a given direction. This is true for some things, yes, but many other aims in life are more complicated.
Example: You can get more fit, fluent or financially secure, by making small adjustments to your net wealth. But starting a business, in contrast, is discontinuous. There's no small action today, that repeated, leads to a business (unless you already have one). It takes setup!
This is why I like to use the term "project" since it is behaviorally focused (like systems), but encompasses things that fail under the model of only allowing (simple) habits. While naive goal-setting may be bad. Creating projects, managing and completing them is good!
The distinctions aren't super-rigorous (most things are fuzzy in life). As such you can have systems of setting projects. You can also have projects to set up new systems. You can also have habits within projects (like waking up early every day to work on your new biz).
I just wanted to weigh in, because while I agree that there are flaws to a naive goal-setting model, the idea that everything is simply a set of continuous incremental improvements, with complexity (i.e. no future planning) and no discontinuities is also misleading.
Of course, I don't really suspect the goals v. system people to hold these naive beliefs, but I think it's a distinction worth pointing out.
Sorry, that should read without complexity.
