It was 6 a.m., and I was lying in bed on my phone, aimlessly scrolling through the most recent Instagram posts. As my finger swiped mindlessly over and over, a sinking sensation developed in my stomach.

"What am I doing?" I thought, "Didn't I wake up this early to go to the gym?"

Yet, here I was. Doing nothing and feeling bad for doing nothing.

I went back to sleep.

You see - like most people when it comes to building new habits I was trying to find a way to force myself out of bed. I was relying on my willpower to make it happen.

The trouble with willpower is that it has a finite capacity. You only have so much willpower, and when you use it to push yourself into anything, you'll eventually run out of it. This is why most New Year's Resolutions fail - we try to rely on our willpower and then we fail and we're back where we started.

So what's the solution?

Stop trying to force yourself into things and instead build systems that make it easy for you to do the things you want to do.

We're all familiar with the cliche system ideas like "put your keys in the same place every day so you don't lose them" or " meal prep on Sundays so you have healthy food during the week."

Systems thinking, however, goes much deeper. It's about comprehending the fundamental reasons why you want to accomplish anything and then finding a way to make it happen without depending on willpower.

In the book, "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, every habit is defined in a cycle comprised of:

• Cues: Stimuli in your environment

• Craving: The creation of desire in the body

• Response: The thing you due to satisfy your craving

• Reward: The end goal of every habit

The secret to using systems thinking is to hack this cycle to your benefit. In my case, I wanted to build the habit of working out every morning so I did two things:

1. I got clear on my real motivation for working out2. I created a compelling system to remove willpower from the equation.

I started by attempting to figure out why working out is so important to me. I realized that I didn't care about the irrelevant advantages of being healthy. Rather, I just wanted to be the sort of person others perceive as fit and powerful. Instead of building my own identity around not working out, I decided to establish an identity for myself as someone who takes care of their body.

With that in mind, I set up my system.

But, I didn't do what you might expect.

Brains are tricky, as you know. My brain required something more powerful than simply a new identity. I needed to start with a poor system and then improve it.

I'd wake up every morning with two goals: to go back to sleep and have a breakfast taco from the coffee shop. I have a fantastic shop downstairs in my apartment complex, and I'm crazy about their tacos. I could eat one every day.

So, I did.

I'd get up, go downstairs to have a taco, then come back upstairs. I didn't even consider going to the gym. If I wanted to fall asleep again, that was fine with me.

Wait, Steven, you're telling me that you started your gym habit system by eating a breakfast taco?

Yes, I did.

After a week or two, I was very, very good at getting up and out of bed. It didn't take effort. The alarm rang and I was up and within a few minutes, I was eating a taco.

But here's how I started hacking this system.

I changed it from:

• Every morning I wake up and go get a breakfast taco and come back to the apartment.

to

• Every morning I wake up and go to the gym and then get a breakfast taco and come back to the apartment.

Now, when I say go to the gym, I don't mean that I went to the gym and exercised. Oh no, not at all. I would simply go to the gym and stand there for at least 5 minutes. The actual practice was only to establish a system of getting up and physically going to the gym.

After a week or so, I couldn't tolerate just standing there any longer, so I'd lift a few weights before heading out to get the taco.

I began by gradually increasing the amount of time I spent in the gym until I was exercising for at least 30 minutes every day. After that, I realized how wonderful I felt after working out and my brain stopped wanting tacos.

Now, I work out 4x a week at least 45 minutes total of weight lifting and I dropped from 260lbs to 220lbs.

No willpower involved - just hacking the built-in systems my brain already comes with.

When you're aware of how habit systems work you can start making slightly better habits, then improve them, and suddenly find yourself with a new and improved lifestyle that didn't require you to "willpower" your way through it.

It's not about being perfect all the time, it's about making tiny improvements that stack up over time. Habits compound upon themselves.

My challenge to you is to look at your life and see the bad habits, and therefore bad systems you already have and ask yourself,

"How can I implement a change to make this system slightly better?"

If your system is:

• Every night after work I play video games for hours and then head to bed.

Try

• Every night I do 20 pushups and 20 situps, play video games for hours, and then head to bed.

Start with the suboptimal system and then make it better.

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