Goal setting

As we're at the resolution-setting part of the year, I am sharing two related posts that I found recently that I liked.
The first one is this blog post by James Clear in which he explains two separate concepts - goals and systems. For coaches, he explains that a goal is to win a championship while a system is what the team does every day to pursue that goal. He further argues that our focus should be our systems, or our daily habits, rather than our goals. If you want to run a half-marathon, focus on running every day, every other day or whatever the frequency is rather than the marathon itself. 
I read this and paired it with the passage below that I recently read in "The Practicing Mind" in which the author wrote that setting goals should be like swimming across a lake with a large tree on the other side. Your goals is the tree. However, to swim to it, you don't stay focused on the tree - you focus on the process of swimming. You do have to look up every once in a while to see if you're still on target for the goal or how much farther you have to go, but if you focused on the tree the whole time, your swimming would suffer and you wouldn't make it. Your goal should be like your rudder - providing direction. Your focus should be on your actions.
The other beauty of these two things is that if you focus on your daily habits and figure out ways to make those habits happen, I'm going to bet that you'll find that you'll not only achieve your goal, but you'll vastly over-achieve it. Returning to the running example, if you make your focus running every day, you will will continually improve at running to a point where you may find when the half marathon rolls around, you're able to run well beyond the half marathon distance. Clear also makes a great reference to book writing, saying that if you set your goal to write a book, you might become intimidated by the prospect of writing the book. If you rather set you sight on a very achievable goal of writing every day, you will probably well exceed your goal.
Another aspect of this that I have read about is spending time understanding your why. Why are you setting that goal? I think the question is going to come up one way or another. If it's to run a race, at some point during your training, you'll hit a point at which you're bummed out, tired and not wanting to proceed. You'll be asking yourself why you're doing it. I read recently that someone who has a strong why can overcome any how.
So, after writing this, some general thoughts. Start first with your goals, identify them. Then identify a why? What greater purpose are they connecting with? Maybe it's to improve your health. Maybe it's to write a book, which may be connected with a greater vision of helping others. Maybe it's winning a championship, but why do you want to win the championship? Next, identify regular, achievable behaviors that you can do that will help you get to your goal. Focus your energy on those. If the going gets tough, come back to your why.
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Interested in your thoughts.
Tom