At the recommendation of my brother, I picked up a copy of Scott Adams’ “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” about a week ago. Yes, it’s an actual book with words printed on pages. Adams is the creator of the Dilbert cartoon.

I’d usually dismiss this type of book. Too often advice or self-improvement books reflect on an author’s early years, that period of time when one can afford to fail, eat broke food and sleep on a friend’s sofa.

One of the precepts presented early in Adams’ book is the idea of adopting “systems” as opposed to focusing on goals. The argument is that “…goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis… Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.”

It’d be absurd to suggest I have a fly fishing ‘style.’ I do have a system. All fishermen do, whether dunking worms, chucking hardware or casting flies.

Whatever the form of fly fishing, it’s a system that counts on a systematic approach. Tenkara requires a specific simple fly fishing system – consisting of a rod, level line (nylon, monofilament or fluorocarbon) and a fly – while a classical fly fishing system adds a reel and a tapered fly line made of PVC, vinyl, polyurethane or other similar materials.

When it comes to getting on or in the water, every fly fisher has an approach, a system. Oh, we like to claim we can adapt to changing conditions – and we can – but that adaptation is part of a system, whether entrenched in the scientific study of entomology or simply successes or failures of past fishing excursions.

Reading “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” got me to thinking about the evolution of my system.

In the early years of my fly fishing career, I focused on out-fishing everyone around me. My brother tends to try to quantify various aspects of life, and he observed after I took him on his first real fly fishing experience that even he, with limited skills and even less technique, was hooking about three fish to every one brought in by the bait and hardware anglers within view. Full disclosure: I took a little evil pleasure in catching and releasing enough fish to make the meat fishers almost livid, particularly when I slipped fat fish back into the water. I sort of still do.

Numbers offer an easy measurement of how much one wins. However – and there’s no pinpointing when it happened – somewhere along the line my idea of “winning” shifted to a competition between myself and the fish. A new system, if you will; one that wasn’t aimed at landing a fish. This one focused on an internal challenge: becoming a better fly fisher. Milestones – not a goals – marked by fooling a fish. Often a specific fish…that one that no one else could tempt.

Without a deadline, without a focus on an end goal, the greater reward is the experience and the milestones along the way. Here’s hoping that this season there will be more experiences and milestones.

What’s your system?