Stop for a moment and think of the biggest problem in your business right now.

This probably won't take much as it's likely top of mind for you anyway.

What did you come up with?

Not enough sales? Low profits? Bad company culture? Poor-quality leads?

None of these are the actual problems. All of these are symptoms.

They're symptoms of a bad system. The problem is the system.

Eating junk food for every meal is a system. It's just not a very good one. Do this long enough, and illness will become a symptom.

Only connecting with your audience when you want to promote something is also a system. Again not a very good one. The symptom will be an unresponsive list, unsubscribes and spam complaints.

And just as good systems compound over time, so do bad systems.

While goals are great, the reality is everything you want is downstream of your systems.

Just like you, over the years I've tried just about every goal-setting strategy out there—writing them down, visualizing them down, visualizing them, sharing them with people to keep me accountable, blah, blah, blah.

None of these worked beyond the honeymoon phase.

The problem is they all mostly rely on willpower. Even if you happen to achieve them through sheer force, the gains are usually short-lived.

Here's what to do instead: Loose goals, tight systems.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says, "The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don't swim upstream."

In my book, Lean Marketing (page 194), I define loose goals and tight systems as follows:

"A loose goal sets the direction you want to go without being fixed on the final destination because there is no final destination. The goal is to keep playing the game and improving indefinitely. A tight system sets up your environment so it's easy to keep improving."

Every time I've ever made serious progress on anything, whether it be writing, weight-lifting, or marketing, it has been a direct result of my tight systems.

Every time I've stalled or gone backward, it has been because my system sucked.

What systems do you need to tighten?