Happy System, Happy Life

Four summers ago, I set the goal of being able to two-hand dunk a basketball from a standstill.

I did plyometrics, mobility, and strength training a couple of times a week. Three months later, I could barely dunk a tennis ball.

So I gave up and wrote a post on the lesson I learned the hard way (because I failed to learn it from Atomic Habits): “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

My takeaway at the time: a goal is some destination you hope to get to, and a system is the vehicle that gets you there.

But I don’t think that’s right anymore. I was too deep in the system to see what I was missing.

Not just me, either. The same goes for just about all personal- and business-development literature. It’s too deep in the system to question the system itself, which is why we keep coming back for more.

Sure, setting up better systems beats pumping motivational music into your brain and charging HAM at a goal like Leeroy Jenkins. But no level of perfectly set-up practices, feedback loops, and targets can get me dunking like Wembanyama, writing like James Clear, or minting money like Alex Hormozi.

Our goals are constrained by the structural limits of our biological systems, physical and cognitive. Put more bluntly, your system is not designed to achieve most of the goals you borrowed from other people. Those goals are mimetic, derived from what others desire. But your system has its own desires.

What might your system’s desires be?

Cyberneticians still quote Stafford Beer’s answer from 1979:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Watch What Your System Does

Our personal, biological systems are made of bones, blood, and neurons. The purpose of this system is not whatever you’re manifesting, bolding and highlighting in your Moleskine, tattooing on your forearm, or agreeing with your life coach. The purpose of your system is what it does.

Fight it, resist it, or even try to escape it as much as you want. Your biological system will keep doing what it does. All your effort accomplishes is generate friction.

So resign and align.

That starts with understanding what it is your system does, even when you wish it didn’t.

If you say you want your own business but keep polishing ideas instead of selling products, maybe your system doesn’t think your ideas are as hot as you do, starting with the idea of being an entrepreneur.

If you say you want to be bold but keep sanding off every sharp edge, maybe your system’s edge has more to do with adapting or reconciling.

If you say you want focus but keep collecting books and podcasts, maybe your system doesn’t buy into your chosen focus or wants to focus on being a researcher instead.

In the past I’ve referred to this as studying your inner species, the intuitive animal that our rational riders keep trying to tame when we should be learning to harness it. I’ve also offered the more mechanistic lens of look at it as reverse-engineering your engine that runs a specific pattern on a specific blend of fuel for a specific purpose.

Whatever frame you choose, the upshot is the same:

To understand your system’s purpose, audit your past for patterns your system/engine/inner species keeps repeating.

I don’t mean bad habits like overthinking, behaving like a jerk, or doomscrolling. Those are surface symptoms of a misaligned system. Understand what misalignments caused your system to act out that way. Stop fighting those symptoms. Find the pattern. Then build around it until the system winning also means you winning.

Quit Wasting Effort on Dinky Levers

In Thinking in Systems, the book on systems from 2008, Donella Meadows gives us a framework for intervening in a system to align its purpose with yours:

The hierarchy of leverage points for intervening in a system.

The lower on this hierarchy, the weaker the leverage—and therefore the bigger the waste of effort it is for us to work on when the higher levers aren’t aligned.

At the lowest leverage level of Meadows’ hierarchy are the ways we’re taught to push toward what we want: targets, practices, and energy/money/time reserves.

Next up from the bottom are the more “advanced” approaches: feedback loops, personal dashboards, incentives and constraints.

Then there’s self-organization: the system’s ability to redesign itself. This is where identity, habits, environment, and “growth mindset” belong. That’s where I’ve typically stopped with my own pursuit of what I want. But this disregards the three most powerful levers in Meadows’ hierarchy.

Start With the Strongest Levers Instead

Meadows’ three top leverage points are about aligning with your system, so the lower levers support your cause rather than create friction.

The second strongest lever is paradigms. This is the story you want to align with your system on. Feed your system nonsense like “I can be anything I put my mind to,” and it won’t bite. It’ll keep doing what it does. So I believe the most obvious paradigm to work under is this:

Life is a system alignment challenge.

One thing I know for sure: My system won’t disagree with me on this. It’s the equivalent of “Happy wife, happy life,” but with my system in Kim’s place.

This alignment story allows my system to get what it wants and do what it does. My job is to understand it, then align surrounding systems – where I live, who I spend time with, what I decide to do – within those constraints.

This brings in number three of Meadows’ top levers: Goals. Not numbers and targets, which are the weakest levers, but what the system counts as “winning.” This challenges Clear’s line from Atomic Habits:

You fall to the level of your system, which rises to the level of its goals.

Not your stated goals. The goals revealed by what the system keeps doing. Work hard toward someone else’s definition of winning and you just become better at losing their game.

Bringing these leverage points of paradigms and goals together, here is the story I’m trying to align with my system on:

I want to enjoy mastering my own game to be as useful as possible alongside others who are doing the same.

Enjoyment comes from minimizing friction with my system.
Mastering my own game means not getting sucked into someone else’s.
Being useful means the game can’t just be privately satisfying. It has to contribute to causes I care about.
Alongside others is because I’ll have more enjoyment and impact that way. Like you maybe?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I can rewire more than I think. Maybe alignment is just endless, dissatisfied optimization in disguise. Maybe there’s some system-transcending spiritual level I can’t understand.

Please challenge me if you think so. I’m not sure I agree with my story, either.

Four years ago, I thought “systems beat goals.” Four years from now, I bet I’ll write about how I was mistaken here. That’s the top of Meadows’ hierarchy anyway: the ability to evolve the paradigm.

That’s where it starts.

Stay spiky,

Chris

PS – Here’s Meadows’ leverage point hierarchy, from most to least powerful, applied to playing your own game by resigning and aligning:

Transcending Paradigms — “staying open” — remembering your story about your own game is a hypothesis, and updating it as you learn more about yourself and the world around you.
Paradigm — “the story underneath it all” — “I want what they want” keeps you playing their games. “My job is to find and play my own game” turns you toward yours.
Goals — “what ‘winning’ means to you” — “look impressive and beat them,” or “get great at my game and be useful.”
Self-Organization — “rebuilding as you learn” — Growing and adapting in your own direction, not toward someone else’s idea of success.
Rules — “your yeses and noes” — say yes to work that fits you, no to stuff you’re only okay at.
Information Flows — “the feedback you listen to” — likes and numbers from other people, or the quieter signal of what actually leaves you useful and alive.
Reinforcing Feedback Loops — “snowballs” — your game gets more fun the better you get, so you do more of it. The wrong game snowballs the other way: more slog, less joy.
Balancing Feedback Loops — “what pulls you back to normal” — the comfort that talks you out of the hard work, the nerves that hit when you put your real work out there.
Delays — “the wait” — how long before your work pays off. Quit too early and you miss it. Cling to the wrong game too long and you waste years.
Stock-and-Flow Structure — “how your days are set up” — does a normal week build skill in your game, or burn you out on stuff other people are better suited for?
Buffers — “your cushions” — savings, energy, the goodwill of people who like you. Spend them on the wrong game and you’ll burn through them. Find a fitting game, and they accumulate.
Numbers / Parameters — “the dials” (weakest) — how hard you push: hours, targets, output. Push harder at the wrong game and you just lose faster.