FOCUS ON SYSTEMS, NOT ONLY YOUR GOALS
18 / 09 / 2025
FOCUS ON SYSTEMS, NOT ONLY YOUR GOALS: meaning and examples
Hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Daily Vitamin. I hope you are having a great week.
It’s common to hear English learners say things like:
⇒ “I want to speak fluent English.”
⇒ “My goal is to understand native speakers easily.”
These are excellent goals—but goals alone don’t guarantee results. What matters more is the system you put in place to create the goal.
James Clear explains it this way: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
A goal is your destination. A system is your daily process that moves you toward it.
✅ For example:
Goal: I want to learn 500 new English words.
System: I review 5 vocabulary cards every morning after breakfast.
Goal: I want to speak English more fluently.
System: I meet a conversation partner for 15 minutes, twice a week.
When your focus is only on the goal, you may feel frustrated if you don’t see fast results. But if you focus on the system, you’ll feel successful every time you complete a step.
🧠 Here’s the key message: It’s not about achieving fluency; it’s about becoming the kind of person who shows up and practises daily. And guess what? If you keep showing up, fluency will come.
➡️ Mini Challenge: Choose one of your English goals and write down the system you will use to support it.
Example:
Goal: Understand native speakers more easily.
System: Watch 10 minutes of a film or a series in English, with subtitles in English, each evening before going to bed.
Small systems, repeated consistently, lead to big change.
👉 I encourage you to share your GOAL and SYSTEM from today's mini challenge on one of our social media sites (Facebook or Bluesky). Sharing your commitments with other people on social media can be a challenge, but it can also motivate you and help you to be more consistent. Get out of your comfort zone, and you will learn faster. :-)
We'll be back tomorrow with our last lesson of the week. Tomorrow we'll be talking about the importance of repetition.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
