Below, Ben Meer shares five key insights from his new book, How to Be Good at Life: Simple Systems to Achieve More and Stress Less.

Ben is the creator of System Sunday, a weekly newsletter on productivity and life design read by more than 250,000 people. He is an executive coach to founders and CEOs, and previously worked as a management consultant at Ernst & Young.

We tend to assume that when something in our life isn’t working, the answer is to try harder. Be more disciplined. Have more willpower. But very often, the better answer is to change the systems around us.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Ben himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

Life has always been hard, just in different ways. For previous generations, much of the burden was physical. Maybe your grandfather really did walk five miles to school. Now, much of the burden is cognitive. The modern world has increased convenience, but it’s also increased complexity. We gained access to nearly infinite information while our cognitive capacity stayed finite. That’s why life today can feel like running a small company you were never taught to manage.

Personal finances, family schedules, endless admin—it’s more moving parts than any brain was built to handle. One of the main solutions we’ve been given for dealing with all this complexity is habits. And habits are genuinely powerful—research suggests that around 40 percent of what we do each day is habitual, which is a huge help.

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