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Last week I touched on the concept of your identity when thinking about your goals and aspirations for 2025. But if you want to become a saver or become a great cook (who finally ditches takeout bills), how do you actually achieve that?
One tweak can make a big difference.
And that’s switching from outcome-based goals to process-based goals.
The outcome is what you ultimately want, like more money in your account when you need it. But the real goal is the process you’ll take to create that, like your habits, your systems, the inputs that you control.
First of all, drilling down to the processes that will ultimately help you achieve the end result you want forces you to identify specific inputs that you control which will create that end result, step by step. Because to set the process-goal, you must reverse engineer how you get to the outcome-goal. You can then create goals which develop and optimize that process.
For example, if your goal is to have $2000 set aside by November for next year’s Christmas spending, to avoid the strain you experienced last month, what is the process you’ll use to create that? Likely it will be changing specific spending habits and tracking how much additional savings you can generate through those changes, as well as creating a system of evaluating and adjusting further throughout the year.
But also, because process-based goals focus on the stuff you actually control, you create a path to success for yourself. Even if the end-goal, the desired result, takes longer than you planned, you succeed anyway when you stick to your system.
It may be that circumstances beyond your control have affected attaining an end result goal, but if you successfully carried out the process to achieve your target, you most definitely will have come out ahead (usually far ahead of where you started), created broader options to face those unexpected circumstances, and can feel accomplished for all the process-based progress you created.
Studies even demonstrate that visualizing successful completion of the processes required to reach a goal produced better results than visualizing having the end-goal itself.
And when you work at adopting new systems and processes for your life, you are taking steps to becoming who you want to be, even well before you reach the goalpost you’ve set for yourself. You build your desired identity simultaneously with taking the necessary actions to attain your ultimate goals. It’s powerful stuff.
Take the time to reverse engineer the goals you have for 2025 and transform those into well thought out process-based goals. Identify the key factors that have to be done, particularly the ones that must be done over and over, and focus on those habits as your goals instead. When you have a great system, the rest will take care of itself.
The prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions in alignment with it.
Gary Keller and Jay Papasan in The ONE Thing
None of this is to say that goals are useless. However, I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress. Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win.
James Clear in Atomic Habits
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey