This may just be a different way of saying that small moves work, that consistently doing a little builds up to a lot. It’s definitely reminiscent of the notion that writing a few words a day gets you a book in the end. But James Clear puts it this way: bollocks to setting goals, concentrate on your day to day systems for getting things done.

Okay, he didn’t say bollocks. Normally I’d now show you what he did say and point you at his website but I find his site a bit annoying: it’s very full-on selling and despite having a lead to this particular article, I couldn’t find this particular article.

So instead, let me show you this quote from Clear as used on a site that found it useful:

If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your systems, would you still get results?

For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

For example, I just added up the total word count for the articles I’ve written this year. In the past 12 months, I’ve written more than 115,000 words. The typical book is about 50,000 to 60,000 words, so this year I’ve written enough to fill two books.

That’s a huge a surprise, since I never set a goal for my writing. I didn’t measure my progress in relation to a benchmark. I never set a word-count goal for any particular article. I never said, “I want to write two books this year.”

What I did focus on was writing one article every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that schedule for 11 months, the result was 115,000 words. I focused on my system and the process of doing the work, and in the end enjoyed the same (or perhaps better) results.

An Almost Foolproof Way to Achieve Every Goal You Set – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (5 February 2014)

Read the full piece and try not to think he’s a wimp for only writing 115,000 words in an entire year.