Setting Goal is to Win the GAME, Building a habit is to Continue Playing the GAME

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split into in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it - but all that had gone before

Back in college, I used to really like a girl. But like most real-life stories, there were many hurdles to be crossed. 

Now, the college I went to was lovely. It was one of the finest colleges in Mangalore, and the students were just as great. In short, everything was terrific except for one thing: the language barrier. I was raised in a Malayali family and grew up speaking Malayalam at home as well as school. English was usually restricted to the school curriculum, and one could sometimes hear it on TV shows. A newly globalized India had far more pressing concerns, and English had not seeped into the crevices of everyday middle-class life.

College changed all of that for me. In an urban milieu like my college with people from all over the country, English acted as the common tongue that united people and gave them a level ground to come together and talk. Faced with this unforeseen situation, I was forced to adapt.

The initial days were hard as you can imagine, but slowly and steadily, they got better. Me and the girl I liked also went out together on a couple of dates. The first few were a bit awkward and involved a lot of hand gesturing and stammering because I couldn't always find the right words, but as I kept on learning and improving, our conversations eventually started to flow.

The one thing I take away from this decades-old experience is that the only way to win is to get better each day. Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—learning a new language, getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family, etc., is to set specific, actionable goals.

For many years, this was how I approached my habits too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the kilos I wanted to lose, for the marathons I wanted to run, for the milestones I want to achieve at work place. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. In fact, it’s pertinent to discuss my weight loss story here. I joined the gym looking to shed some weight. I remember the feeling of utter disappointment that washed over me every time I would stand on the weighing machine. And mind you, if you are on a weight loss journey, you cannot keep off the scales. It was the same for me. But the week-by-week results did little to boost me up. One week I would lose an ounce only to gain it back the next week. Finally, feeling frustrated and angry, I gave up trying to measure myself and just worked out for my own pleasure. This move really shifted the scales for good. Within a couple of months, I was already inching closer to my goal. And I had done all of that without any target setting. If anything, working towards a goal only hindered my performance. That’s when I realized that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. If you focus on behavior, your goals will automatically fall into place. 

By that, however, I do not mean that goals are entirely useless. They are not. Goals are great for setting a direction or trajectory to your life but having a sound system for achieving those goals is eventually how you make progress. Achieving our goals and dreams is fantastic, but that's not the most important thing about setting goals. The most important thing is the type of person that we become along the way. 

I believe the most significant reason people miss their goals is not for want of a clear purpose but of how they will achieve it. Despite being touted by many a self-help guru, I think a goal-first outlook has several inherent problems. Not least of which is survivorship bias. Often while setting lofty goals, we tend to focus on the people who achieved such goals- the winners- and wrongly presume that ambitious goals led them to success while completely ignoring those who had the very same objectives but didn't succeed. We do not see the process they went through but only the promise. All of us want to see or achieve the promised goal without really going through the process.

Fulfilling goals fills us with a sense of pride, of having done something remarkable. But it's only a momentary change if you have not made it a part of your life. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. We need to take a step back and change the systems that cause those results. When we fix a problem at the results level, we only fix it temporarily, but if you make the process a way of your life and grow with it, we rectify the problem at its root. That’s where real change begins. All of our success hinges on that one thing.

Lastly, from my own experience, I've seen that chasing goals only makes me sadder, unhappier. I defer happiness to the day when I finally reach my next milestone. Happiness then becomes something for my future self to enjoy. I do not believe in this boxed-up and misguided version of happiness. Instead, I focus on the antidote and fall in love with the process rather than the result. I am satisfied whenever my system is running full-steam, and wholeheartedly accept circumstances that give me room for improvisation. You might look at me today and see all the nice things about me but that’s not the entire me. You seen my Glory but not my Story. Every person has a story to tell and mine was scattered with pitfalls before I began to learn from them and turn them on their heads.