Systems are boring. Boring but necessary.
P. T. Barnum knew it in 1880:
Men should be systematic in their business. A person who does business by rule, having a time and place for everything, doing his work promptly, will accomplish twice as much and with half the trouble of him who does it carelessly and slipshod.
P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting (1880), Be Systematic
Twice as much, with half the trouble. That’s still what good systems do for a business.
You fall to the level of your systems
If you want a predictable, sustainable business, it will come down to the quality of your systems. As James Clear puts it, you don’t rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.
Everyone on the start line wants gold
Think about it. In sport, at the beginning of something like the Olympics, every athlete in every event has exactly the same goal: to stand on the podium with the gold medal around their neck.
So what determines who actually gets there? So much of it comes down to the training systems they used in the lead-up to the event itself.
Keep it simple
Keep your systems simple, too. As I said on my podcast, Your Best Year Starts Here: “If you make things too complicated in any area of your life, you’re likely to fail.”
It’s systems that make your success repeatable. What’s one thing you do over and over in your business that deserves a simple system of its own?
