BookYol

Concept

Systems over willpower

Systems over willpower is the principle that money decisions should be made once and executed by a mechanism, because willpower is not weak but unreliable, and it fails in exactly the tired, stressed or celebratory months when the decision matters most.

Every month you have to decide to save is a month in which you might decide not to. The decision is easy in a calm month and hard in a bad one, so a saving habit that depends on the good months produces savings only in the good months. A rule that runs before temptation arrives does not need to defeat temptation. Clason's Babylonians took their tenth before they saw the rest; Sethi's standing orders move the money on payday before the account is looked at. The principle generalises: the card that pays itself in full, the fund bought on the same day every month regardless of the news, the written sentence about what you do in a crash. None of these require strength. They require being set up once, while calm, and then not being touched. Money compounds only on reliability, and a system is reliable in a way a person is not.

A real-life example

A physiotherapist in Kütahya resolved every January to save for a flat deposit and managed it in about half the months. This year she replaces the decision with a standing order on payday. It fires in the month she changes clinics, the month her mother is in hospital and the month of her sister's wedding, and by December the deposit fund is the largest it has ever been.

How to use it

  1. 1Turn each money decision you make repeatedly into a standing order or a setting, made once.
  2. 2Set the system up on a calm day and write down why, so a bad month cannot argue with it.
  3. 3Measure the system by whether it fired, not by how you felt about money that month.