Why are you still waiting for your life to begin?
Inertia — 217
Picture a gardener who tends her plot every morning. She waters, she weeds, she turns her soil with careful hands. But down the street, her neighbour sits at his window to dream of a perfect garden with magazine-worthy blooms and nutrient-dense plots. From time to time, he buys seeds, inspired by irregular bursts, plants them with grand visions, and then waits.
The first gardener harvests every season. The second is still dreaming. Still waiting for the right moment, the right conditions, the right time to start over. This is the story of what James Clear popularised: goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.
Today, some cultures are drunk on destination thinking. “Set bigger goals”, their people cheer. But this obsession with endpoints leads you to a peculiar kind of suffering—a just about noticeable chronic ache as the constant hunger for arrival, while letting life pass before you. After recently taking a week in Barcelona, I saw the opposite, how it should be. People, out for the day, walking slowly, sat together, creating a peaceful murmur that brought calm to the streets we walked. People were living. Aware. Helped by the sun. It’s a bit rarer to find that in the metropolitan world I call home.
The past five years have been the most transformative of my life because I gained a wider perspective on how goals drive you to live for tomorrow. “For trading your contentment today, I will give you future satisfaction”, you’re promised. An ask to mortgage the happiness you have today for some distant ownership tomorrow. It’s like saving all your smiles for the weekend or hoarding them in a jar. What about the rest of the week? What about today? Life unfolds not every two days but every second, including the spaces between Monday and Friday. You have the chance to smile and succeed in everything you do right now, in the thousand small moments people make themselves too busy chasing the future to notice.
Put another way: a goal is a single photograph. It’s beautiful. Static. Relatively complete. It captures one moment. But systems are like breath itself: continuously rewarding. Life-giving and present. A system doesn’t care about the photograph the same way the best athletes don’t yap every day about their past victories for the rest of their lives, because soon it’s onto the next one. Systems care about being alive, being engaged, and being fully here.
The goal-oriented mind lives in a strange purgatory that Scott Adams named best:
If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
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[O]ne should have a system instead of a goal. The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavours. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.
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Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
It's the ache of almost-there. The weight of not-yet-enough. Every day without the prize feels like you’re falling short. Every morning begins with the reminder of what you lack rather than what you're becoming.
The system-centred mind wakes up and wins immediately. Today, I write my pages. Today, I take my walk. Today, I practice my craft. It’s where success is doing, not getting. It celebrates the gardener's hands in the soil, not just the beautiful harvest that results.
It’s being a music practitioner who lives in the music itself—the scales, the exercises, the small discoveries that happen when fingers find new patterns on familiar keys. Between you and one who dreams, one waits to become worthy. The other becomes worthy through the waiting.
Systems are forgiving in ways goals never are. A goal missed is failure, stark and binary. But a system interrupted is simply a system resumed. Miss a day of practice? Tomorrow, you practice. Break your writing streak? Tonight, you write. The system doesn't judge; it simply takes you back with open arms.
There's something deeply human about this approach, something that honours how we actually live; we don't exist in grand gestures and dramatic transformations. We exist in repetition, rhythm. The small devotions that shape our days. The mother who reads to her child each night isn't working toward a goal; she's living inside a system of love. The friend who calls on Sundays isn't checking off an achievement; she's practising connection.
This is why systems feel so different in the body. Goals create tension—the pull and strain of reaching. Systems create flow through the ease of showing up, the satisfaction of doing what you said you'd do. The beautiful paradox is that people who build systems often achieve more than those who run for goals. The daily writer produces more words than the dreamer waiting for inspiration or permission. The consistent exerciser becomes stronger than the one planning the perfect workout. The system builder doesn't just win once; they move themselves into a cycle of success because all they know is the right formula.
In the end, goals are weather—temporary, dramatic, and subject to change. Systems are climate—steady, reliable, and sustainable. So tend your daily plot. Water it and trust the rhythm of return. The harvest will come, but the real gift is in the tending itself—the way it changes your hands, the way it opens your heart, the way it teaches you that the most beautiful victories are often the quietest ones.