The Mental Model Behind Every High-Performer I Know

During my first college internship, I completely replaced myself with Visual Basic scripts. Let me explain. 

I had been working in Excel for the first month of the internship. Basic market analysis stuff for a government consulting firm. I was annoyed by having to do the same things over and over again, and while cell functions were helping, they weren't handling as much of the work as I thought the computer could.

Then I got some advice from another intern doing some programming work for them: 

"If you're doing something manually on a computer more than once, there's probably a way to make the computer do it for you."

After I heard that advice, I did more research. I eventually learned about Visual Basic, a programming language built into Excel, and after spending a few weeks piecing together a basic understanding of it I was able to automate away almost all of the work I was doing as an intern.

By the time I left, I had completely replaced myself with Visual Basic scripts.

This was my first exposure to the "Systems Mindset." The idea that when faced with any kind of recurring task or process, there is usually some way to set up a system to handle it for you.

As I tried to embody this mentality, I started to see that many of the most successful people I encountered had mastered this mindset. When they saw something repetitive or defective in their life or business, they would build a system to handle it for them.

Sometimes this manifested in small ways: like using a text expander to type their email in 3 characters instead of 20.

But it more often manifests in big ways: like hiring people or building a business.

Whatever scale it's at, the systems mindset is a key piece of entrepreneurial and professional success, and even if we've adopted it in one area, we may be blind to other parts of our life where we're failing to employ it.

In this article, I'm going to explore what makes the systems mindset so powerful, how we can use it to be more effective in our personal and professional lives, plus some common challenges with using it and how to overcome them.

By the end, you'll have a roadmap for spotting and creating more systems in your life, freeing you up to focus on your most important work. 

Why The Systems Mindset is So Powerful

The systems mindset is how you maximize your ROI on time.

It's the recognition that by investing additional resources into the task at hand to build a system for it, you can save yourself a significant amount of resources in the future.

Basic automations are the simplest example. Let's say you spend 15 minutes a day going through all the random email newsletters and promos you get. If you spent an hour actually unsubscribing from all the ones you don't want anymore, you'd be dramatically increasing the resources you're allocating to this problem in the short term.

But in the long term, you might cut down your daily management to 5 minutes, which means that after 6 days you've broken even on your investment, and every day after that you're getting an additional 16.7% ROI on that one hour you invested.