Open-minded people,

This week I'm reading: James Clear’s 2018 Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

I’m a bit stressed at the moment… lots going on. It’s entirely self-inflicted (and also maybe genetic? My Dad also gets around exhausted, complaining about how much he has going on all the time…)

I spotted Atomic Habits on my bookshelf, having read it earlier this year and I quickly realised my problem. I am running around with all these little things I want to get done (you could call them goals). But I don’t (yet) have the systems in place to achieve them.

James Clear explains why this doesn’t work and why we should spend more time designing systems and less time focussing on our goals.

But first… who is he?

James Clear is an American guy who’s really into habits. So much so he started writing about them in a newsletter. People lapped it up. He had one of the fastest growing newsletters in 2014 and when he reached 200,000 subscribers Penguin gave him a book deal. This book, Atomic Habits was a #1 New York Times bestseller and has sold more than 5 million copies. Clear didn’t go to a fancy university, he doesn’t have a PhD, his first job wasn’t at McKinsey. He just started writing online about what he was interested in and using the powers of the internet he reached an audience of millions… Food for thought.

Anyway, back to systems.

Forget about goals, focus on systems instead

Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life – getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family – is to set specific actionable goals.

For many years, this is how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but failed at a lot of them. Eventually I began to realise that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

What’s the difference between systems and goals?... Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results…Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progression.

Clear outlines a problem that results from spending too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems. This problem is exactly what I’m experiencing.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change

Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room – for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.

Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

Cool. So some new systems to put in place.

Wait what was Problem #1?

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning – the survivors – and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goals cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour De France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before – just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

And what’s the British cyclist thing?

“The fate of British Cycling changed one day in 2003…” Since 1908, British cyclists had won only one Olympic gold medal and in 110 years of the Tour de France no British cyclist had EVER won. Then in the ten-years from 2007-2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic or paralympic golf medals. At the Beijing Olympics they won 60% of the gold medals available! And Tour de France? From zero wins in 110 years, British cyclists had 6 victories in 7 years (starting 2012: Wiggins, Froome, an Italian, Froome, Froome, Froome, Thomas). How did they do it? Well I just followed a footnote and I’m reading that maybe it was drugs… but ignoring that for a second. Clear argues it was the 1% changes they made under Dave Brailsford's leadership (some as obscure as: washing their hands properly (to avoid getting sick), buying new pillows (better night’s sleep), painting the inside of the truck white (to spot dust particles on the bikes)).

I'm not trying to win the Tour de France at the moment, just trying to keep my flat in good order and my energy bills under control. Confident that some good system design can take care of these things.

Speaking of energy bills...

This week I'm asking: Do you know the economics of your local petrol station? And what can we do about governments misleading us?

A friend sent me last week's episode of the All-in podcast, which brought my attention to a recent tweet from the White House:

The All-In guys were up in arms:

“They are almost all small business owners…”

“Absurd. That’s just not how the economy works”

“Do you think they look at a Chevron and think its owned by Chevron”

“Some millennial with a couple of master’s degrees and $400,000 in debt is rage tweeting from the White House”

“It would take an 8 second Google search to know that less than 10% of gas stations in American are owned by these corporates”

“These are mom and pop businesses…this is insanity”

“it’s a lot of immigrants…”

“…it’s a lot of south Asians which is why this is sensitive to me”

“these people, their profit margins are like 2%”

“they make no money on gas they make all their money selling cigarettes and soda”

I did the 8 second Google search. 57% of US petrol stations are owned by individual operators. I.e. their whole livelihood potentially depends on the operation of one petrol station. And yeah, they only make a 1.4% margin on fuel (my source). That’s the reason most major oil companies have backed out of the retail business: generally selling fuel isn’t very profitable. Also true, the real money is made inside the store…selling those weirdly expensive doritos (and other goods) brings in 70% of the profits.

So, what’s the point? Well, I don’t think the average person necessarily knows this stuff. That data was just for the US. How do the economics work where you live? Do you know? If you asked your friends, would they know? I’m guessing most people see the Shell logo and assume Shell runs the garage. Why wouldn’t you?

So, are politcians taking advantage of our limited petrol economics knowledge? Easier to blame businesses than to educate people on how the retail fuel market works, and why prices are so high at the moment? Or does the tweet writer genuinely not understand the economics either?

Jeff Bezos replied to the tweet with the same question:

What do you think? Will Bezos run for US President in 2024?

Wait not that.

Do you think financial illiteracy is so widespread that even the White House staff have no clue what they’re talking about? Or do you think it’s deliberate misdirection? Either way what can we do about it?

“It was not written by Biden so let’s not put the blame on him…that strategy is clearly broken because it is run by someone who at minimum is innumerate, and who is clearly financially illiterate, who doesn’t know how to google anything. Because that’s the only way you could write something that insipid… Biden should fire whoever wrote that tweet.”

P.S. You only have to look at what’s going on in Sri Lanka (crowds burning down the Prime minister’s residence, protestors occupying the President’s swimming pool) to know how serious things get when people can’t afford or don’t have access to essentials, like fuel.

Last week you said: life without a vocation is pretty good

Personally, I do not have a true calling in life and I find that tremendously freeing. My work is fine - it is sometimes intellectually stimulating, and it has brought a lot of my closest friends into my life, but it's not that deep for me. I log off and easily switch off to go do the things that bring me joy and fulfillment (many hobbies, spending time with friends and family, etc.). And it pays me enough to do the things I want to do. I used to feel great shame that I didn't have "a thing" I wanted to do but watching people suffer and struggle in the name of the only thing they feel destined to do helped me see the gift of being a generalist :)

PS if you have any Nigerian princes in your readership (or other extremely wealthy people), tell them to hmu ;) ready to quit my job and devote myself to being a lady of leisure – N.O.

This week I'm grateful for: openness about mental health struggles

Okay this is a difficult topic to talk about and not sure I've done a good job of it so please bear with me / feel free to ignore if talking about this stuff makes you uncomfortable. The message is compassion... let me give it a shot.

I couldn't let this week go by without talking about my favourite sport... I was very privileged to attend the ladies’ singles final and gentleman’s doubles final on Saturday thanks to Wimbledon honouring the ballot tickets I won back in Feb 2020. Strawberries and cream, the Duchess of Cambridge wearing yellow etc etc. Great day out. Loved it. But I want to discuss what happened on Sunday…

Kyrgios. Love him or hate him. Maybe you watched the final, maybe you have no idea who he is and zero interest in tennis. Cool, the message extends beyond tennis so read on...

(Before I say anymore, obviously, assault is not okay, code violations for swearing etc deserved, and mental illness or not we all need to be accountable for our own behaviour.)

I had a weird reaction after the match… I burst into tears. Totally unexpectedly (and not because Kyrgios lost and I really wanted him to win, although that’s also true…) I heard the commentators mention his self-harming and suicidal thoughts. And then I watched him scream at his players box, distressed and angry, multiple times throughout the match. I thought he probably hates himself for how much he is abusing the people who love him, and have flown across the world to support him, but he’s just not in control of his emotional response.

If my assumption is true, I’ve also been there (albeit much less publicly, and not usually on a tennis court). During my own battle through the depths and darkness of depression, at least a couple of times the self-hatred I was teeming with spilled out onto the people closest to me, the people who were trying desperately to support me. Afterwards I felt horrible about it, as any human would (right? Who enjoys hurting the people they love?). But, I don’t think you have to have experienced depression to admit that we have all, at some point in our lives, behaved in a way that we're not proud of towards someone who we care about (although again, not necessarily so publicly).

And although we may feel a bit uncomfortable, or even find his behaviour distressing as it's exhibited in front of millions, I don’t think taking to twitter to call it “embarrassing” (as one former tennis pro did), is very compassionate… (I think that's the part that made me feel very sad.)

Here’s something Kyrgios wrote on Instagram earlier this year:

This was me 3 years ago at the Australian Open. Most would assume I was doing ok mentally or enjoying my life… it was one of my darkest periods. If you look closely, on my right arm you can see my self harm. I was having suicidal thoughts and was literally struggling to get out of bed, let alone play in front of millions. I was lonely, depressed, negative, abusing alcohol, drugs, pushed away family & friends. I felt as if I couldn’t talk or trust anyone. This was a result of not opening up and refusing to lean on my loved ones and simply just push myself little by little to be positive. I know that day to day life can seem extremely exhausting, impossible at times. I understand that you feel if you open up it may make you feel weak, or scared. I’m telling you right now, it’s OK, you are not alone. I’ve been through those times when it seemed as if those positive energetic vibes were never ever going to be reality. Please, don’t feel as if you are alone, if you feel as if you can’t talk to anyone, I’m here, reach out. I’m proud to say I’ve completely turned myself around and have a completely different outlook on everything, I don’t take one moment for granted. I want you to be able to reach your full potential and smile. This life is beautiful.

Hopefully we can all stay in ~life is beautiful~ mode as often as possible, be kind to one another on the journey, and forgive ourselves (and each other) as we inevitably mess up from time to time along the way…

xx Delia
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P.S. As always... feel free to forward me :)

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