 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I wanna talk to you about why you should forget about your goals and focus on your systems. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into this topic about forgetting your goals and focusing on your systems. Last week's episodes, we dove into a topic in the book by James Clear called Atomic Habits. And I wanna focus on another subject from that book and it's all about focusing on your system instead of your goals. Now if you've been following us for any period of time, you know that I say over and over. Instead of the word system, I use the word process but I'm always talking about when it comes to trading, focus on your process, focus on your discipline, focus on your mindset, focus on basically the system and the profits will take care of themselves. So when I read this chapter in the book, it was kinda cool how it kind of reaffirmed exactly what I've been saying from a trading perspective for years. So this is gonna kind of contradict a lot of what you've been hearing probably your whole life, whether it's in sports or learning a musical instrument or your grades in school or whatever it is. We've always been taught if you're going to be successful, you have to set goals, right? And I don't want to completely dismiss goals as if they're a terrible thing to do or a terrible thing to set but the idea of just setting a goal and expecting it to happen, it just doesn't work that way. So what exactly is the difference between a system and a goal? Basically, a goal is about the results that you want to achieve and systems are about the processes that lead you to those goals, that lead you to those results. A couple examples that he gives in the book is, one, if you're a coach, your goal might to be to win a championship but your system is the way that you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches and the way that you conduct practice. If you are a business owner or an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a multimillion dollar business but your system is how you test the product ideas, how you hire employees, how you run your marketing campaigns or if you're a musician, your goal might be to play a new song but your system is how often do you practice? How do you break down and tackle the difficult pieces of that specific piece of music that you're trying to play and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor? Those are all part of the system. So the interesting question is, if you completely ignore your goals and only focus on your system, will you still succeed? I believe that you absolutely would. For example, the goal in any sport is to finish the game with the best score but it would be crazy to spend the entire game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better and better each day with your process, with your systems in your practice. So I would encourage you, if you want to get better results, then forget about setting big goals, focus on your process, focus on your system instead. So in the book, James Clear lists four different problems with thinking about goals and not spending enough time on your process or systems. Problem number one is that winners and losers have the same goals. I think a lot of times goal setting kind of suffers from this case of survivorship bias where we concentrate on the people who end up winning and mistakenly assume that their ambitious goals led to that success. But remember the team that lost, they had goals too. Think about every individual who ever has competed in the Olympics. Every single Olympian has a goal of winning a gold medal. And typically those who qualify for the Olympics are the tippy top of the best in their sport when compared to everyone that they've competed against to get to that point. So is it just simply their goal of winning that gold medal that propelled them to actually do it? Or is it the process? Is it the practice? Is it the daily grind and everything that they did to prepare for that event? Problem number two, achieving a goal is only a momentary change. So for example, maybe you have a dirty house, right? And your goal is to clean it. And so you garner up the energy, you clean your house, it looks perfect. But guess what? If you maintain the same sloppy habits of just throwing your dirty clothes off when you go to take a shower, leave the dishes in the sink, you maintain the same sloppy habits, you're going to get back to the point or your house just is dirty again and you're gonna be back to square one. So achieving your goal only changes your life for a moment. We always think we need to change our goals. We always think we need to change our results, but the results are actually not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems and processes that actually cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order for that change to be permanent, you need to solve the problems at the system level. So think about your own goals when it comes to trading. Do you have this big audacious goal that you wanna make a million dollars? Or what is your goal? Everybody gets into trading with the goal of making money, right? So why is it that some people do make consistent profits and some don't? If we all have the same goal, what is it that makes some people actually succeed and a lot of people actually fail? If you focus on the process, if you focus on following your rules, if you focus on your discipline, the profits take care of themselves. Problem number three, and I thought this was interesting, goals restrict your happiness. I've found myself fall into this trap where you think once you reach a certain goal, then you'll be happy. Once I make a certain amount of money every month or once I get to a point where I have a million dollars, then I'll be happy. Once I lose 20 pounds, then I'll be happy. The problem is that these goals kind of create an either or conflict. Either you achieve your goal and you're successful or you fail and you're disappointed. So you kind of box yourself into a very narrow version of happiness. And the reality is these end results, these goals, a lot of the end result of some arbitrary number or some arbitrary goal that you make up in your mind, a lot of times these things are not in our control. So if we can focus on being happy on what we can control, the overall health of our mental situation is gonna be much better because we're actually doing things that we can control. We can control our process. We can control what we focus on in our tasks that we complete on a daily basis. We can't control what the market does. We can't control exactly what kind of profits we're gonna get. And problem number four, goals are at odds with long-term progress. Now this is something that I know all too well from personal experience. In the past, I have competed in different half marathons, Iron Man's, that kind of thing. The problem is it creates a little bit of a yo-yo effect. A lot of times I'll train and work hard for months for that specific event, but as soon as I cross the finish line, guess what? I stopped training. In fact, I did a half Iron Man. I don't even remember when it was. It was years ago. And so when I was, and it was the first time I did it, so I bought a brand new, like a really nice, pretty expensive road bike, street bike to train. I trained twice a day. So I was swimming in the morning, biking at night, swimming in the morning, running in the afternoon, biking in the morning, running in the afternoon. So it was kind of a two a day training ordeal leading up to this event. And I bought this equipment and everything else. Well, what happened is as soon as I finished the event, it felt good. It was a great accomplishment. I felt great about it when I did it. But guess what? That bicycle hung in my garage for six years after that before I ever even touched it again because that goal, that race, it's no longer there to motivate me. So once I hit that particular goal, what is left there to help push me forward? And then what happens is I reverted back into old eating habits, not working out as much because I didn't have this specific goal to accomplish. So think about this. The purpose of setting a goal is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. I've said this in previous podcasts, but you've got to get to the point where you fall in love with the process of trading. If you fall in love with the process of trading, your success is going to accelerate much quicker than if you focus on the result or the goal of making money in trading. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress. If you can focus less on a single accomplishment and focus more about the cycle of just endless refinement and continuous improvement, you are going to see a dramatic shift in the actual results that you achieve. So I hope this was helpful. The book, Atomic Habits, it is not a trading book, but man, there are some really good things that really pertain to how you can use the tactics and the strategies and the concepts of that book to become a better trader. So I would highly recommend it to all of you. And if you like this episode, please go to Apple or Spotify, leave a rating and review. It helps other people find us. And as always, feel free to drop in on our trade hacker community. Just go to community.navigationtrading.com. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.