Hello, I'm lost. Well, sort of. If spending years of your life setting "SMART" goals has yielded lackluster results, maybe there is a better way to think about them. Achieving goals and growing in your career is difficult when you don't take the time to understand the fuzzy boundaries between all the different "systems" that make up your life.

By thinking from the top down instead of the bottom up, you can start to uncover the secrets behind why you are holding yourself back and what is actually contributing to everything you have been able to accomplish so far. This will enable you to strategically position yourself for future opportunities.

Everything connects, and everything is a factor in how fulfilled you are in your life. Adopting systems thinking has helped me uncover important strategies and thought patterns to help manage the chaos of growing as a developer — and a human being.