The thought above is by Gino Wickman, a famous entrepreneur, passed on to me by my mentor, Ken. While the idea is originally meant to strengthen the process component of any organization, it is one that can be adapted at a very personal level helping you to achieve your goals and to lead a worthy life.

First, let’s analyze the sentence word by word!

Systemize means to make something that already exists into a fixed plan or a scheme.

Being predictable refers to everything that can be known or seen in advance. Humanize is a verb, with the very gray and broad meaning of ‘make something more human.’ But what is more human? When it is a company providing a service, this can mean a successful marketing campaign making the market understand what the product is about in general. At your individual level, humanize means you accepting and managing something with your personal values and biases. Exceptional is simply anything that is out of the ‘usual.

But what is this all about? In my experience, most of us struggle with making any kind of meaningful changes, not because we are weak or that the change is just too big for a bite, but because we lack effective systems. I will use a simple example to present you the idea.

Let’s say you wish to lose a few kilograms of fat so you can fit into those old clothes of yours and feel 5-10 years younger again. Facing the brutal facts, it is really not that complicated to lose fat – you only need to follow a few principles: prioritize protein, be in a calorie deficit, eat more quality meals, stay active, respect your sleep. All this information is available with a 15-second Google search, so where and why do we fall short so often? The secret lies in systemizing to the predictable.

There are a lot of things that are predictable in a weight-loss journey, so let’s only discuss a few of those examples:

• Eating out will not allow you to efficiently manage your proteins and the quality of your meals. It makes sense to prepare your own meals.
• It is likely that you have other responsibilities than cooking fresh. food. Looking at your work schedule and private duties, it makes a lot of sense to block some time for food preparation.
• You need to stay active. Workouts are important, but having a fixed and planned schedule will work better than leaving it up to the day.

As you can see, there are many things you can predict and plan better, so when something goes wrong – this is the exceptional – you will have better management of your experience. Without planning your meals, it’s easy to mismanage the quality of your dishes; now, if you manage your meals well enough up to 80%, that other 20% leaves enough space for a friend’s dinner or a business lunch without the feeling and pressure of failure.

The people who are beating their goals and succeeding in the fields where you struggle are not the people with willpower or special skills. They have simply built better systems (behaviors), so they do not deviate from the journey at the first obstacle.