Extracting a boat from the river is just a system

I’ve just read a ebook called ‘The Systems Mindset’ by Sam Carpenter.  This is his second book – his first book was called ‘Work The System’.  Both books are well worth reading.

As I read The Systems Mindset. I decided to note down a few quotations from this 164 page book to give you a flavour of what is covered:

Your whole existence and all the world around you is an immense collection of independent systems and subsystems.

Via a host of separate processes, our lives are spent in a constant quest for control.

Here is the simple foundational premise of the Systems Mindset: Your life is not a chaotic swirling mass of sights, sounds, and events within which you must incessantly fight for survival. Rather, it’s an orderly collection of independent processes, many of which you can quietly adjust so they will deliver you the life experiences you want. I call this perspective the Systems Mindset.

Your life is a collection of individual systems!

A system is a linear sequence of steps that execute over time, leading to a result.

Systems want to execute properly to produce their intended results.

To get desired outcomes, you must direct the machinery that produces the outcomes.

In this moment, every condition of your life was preceded by a linear process that executed over time. Consider the following, what I call the Universal Formula for How Things Happen: 1+2+3+4 = Result.

The systems of your life are executing all the time. You can’t turn them off. The conditions of your existence are the products of these relentlessly executing individual machines—machines that will remain invisible and unmanaged—or, through the Systems Mindset, machines that you will choose to see and then direct.

This is the absurdly simple blueprint: If you put consistent effort into system improvement; you’ll reach your goal of living the exact life you want.

And so it makes sense for you to immerse yourself in performing system improvements, to spend a lot of time doing it.

Here’s what I want to hammer home: Since it’s incontestable that every future result in your life will be preceded by a linear process that executes over time, you must spend focused, deliberate effort—in this moment— managing those processes.

How much time should you spend managing the systems of your life? I’d say, a lot. The more time you spend in this system improvement place, the more you will get what you want in your life.

And if you feel that sometimes you’re beating yourself to death to live the existence you want, here’s what’s up: Your world is unsatisfactory because you are not deliberately and intensely controlling the machinery that creates your life results.

So to achieve success, stop trying to rearrange the bad results of unseen and therefore unmanaged systems. That’s fire-killing. Instead, see and then manage your machinery so it produces the results you desire.

First, the mechanical processes of your life must improve, and after that occurs, your emotional state will improve. So, be a mechanic, not a psychologist: Get mechanical control first and then, I promise, the emotional control will follow.

Here’s how to use Ockham’s law in everyday life: When there is a decision to be made and one of the solutions is more complex than the other, and you really, really can’t decide which solution to take, pick the simplest option.

To paraphrase Sir William: “The simplest solution is invariably the correct solution.”

Successful people—the people who get what they want out of life—spend their time observing and then managing the systems that produce their results. Unsuccessful people—those who never seem to get what they want—spend their time fire-killing, constantly trying to untangle the random results of their unmanaged systems.

Expend your energy in quietly building and adjusting the particular machinery that will lead to freedom and life success.

Your life can be what you want it to be if you see it for the mechanical marvel it is, and then take action.

99.9 percent of life’s systems work perfectly. Consider the countless processes that execute with amazing efficiency: plants, animals, oceans, businesses, airplanes, bicycles, cities, whole societies, and six billion human bodies.

And so this life you live is composed of a countless number of perfect linear systems, many of which are under your control. These systems are the invisible threads that hold the fabric of your life together. If there is an outcome that doesn’t suit you, you can change that outcome by making an improvement within a system, adding a system, or eliminating a system.

And again, what of those things you can’t fix because they are out of your control? Relax and move on. If you can’t adjust something, don’t worry about it.

If you would like to read The Systems Mindset by Sam Carpenter you can get it for free in return for your email address at this URL:

http://www.thesystemsmindset.com/get-the-book-free/