Processes, Systems, and Outcomes

Hi and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan and in each episode I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now here's today's lesson. Process systems, and outcomes. Invest your time in good processes instead of being focused solely on outcomes. This is challenging because often a good outcome will lead you to believe that the path or process that you took to get there doesn't matter, but it absolutely does. Good process is the foundation of long-term success. Good process means you can bring in other people to help and train them quickly. Good process provides a safety net for innovation and smart risk. Because even if the risk is a failure, a good process will help you bounce back quickly and try again. Focus on the process and raise your personal baseline. This reminds me of the episode that I did a couple of weeks back profiling the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Annie Duke is a professional poker player and she encourages us to focus more on our process for making bets than the outcome of those bets. Because you can't always control what other people have or what other people do. In fact, that's rarely the case. But what you can do is have a good process, a good strategy for making bets. And the more bets that you make, the better your system and strategy will get because you'll be able to feed in the results of past bets, decisions, and risks to your future decisions. I'm a huge football fan, and so I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to college football coaches. Around 25% of college football coaches turned over this year, so say about 30 of the 120-ish Division I teams. This is interesting to think about because a good coach continuously improves his process of building a staff, recruiting players, on-field strategy, keeping players in the program. The reasons he makes decisions becomes more important than the outcome in all but the ultimate game time situations. Now, this isn't to say that winning games doesn't matter if you're a football coach. Ultimately, this is what you're paid to do. It's the same for the goals that you want to reach, the habits you want to make and break. And the milestones that you want to hit in your own personal and professional life. But if you only focus on those outcomes, you'll miss the system and the process that goes into making them happen. As in football program building and in the type of life you want to be building, focus on the quality of your bets and decisions over time, the system and the process that you build to make better decisions every single day. With good process, you'll be able to raise your expected outcome and have more success and stability in work and life. Thanks for listening to The Daily Dot. I really appreciate it. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram. You can find me @MattRagland. I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode, so thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.