Sticking to goals might be hurting your long-term success.

In sports, the ultimate goal is to finish with the best score. But fixating on the scoreboard won’t help the team win. To win the team needs to improve its performance every day.

If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goal, then what differentiates the winners from the losers? The goal isn’t what makes the difference. It's what you do day in and day out that matters.

Take the British Cycling team, for example. Before their remarkable success, they had the same goal as any other cycling team: to win. But it wasn’t the goal that helped them to win, it was the systems that they put in place to make continuous, incremental improvements.

Focusing on inputs and processes is one of the things that has made Amazon so successful. What Jeff Bezos calls “output metrics” are like the final score at the end of a game. The focus should be on the inputs instead. Input metrics measure activities that give the desired results if they’re done right.

Find the inputs that make a difference and build systems around them so that what you do day to day improves performance.

Goals often reflect the specific priorities and objectives of individual managers. But systems involve ongoing processes that endure because they embed behaviours into the organisation’s culture and operations and aren’t tied to any particular manager.

So to achieve better results in business, stop obsessing about goals and start building the right systems that drive success.