Modern Wisdom - #1077 - Chris Bailey - Why Some Goals Feel Effortless (and others hurt)

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

Chris Bailey is a productivity expert, speaker, and author. How do you make goals actually stick? We all want better for ourselves, but most goals fade. So how do you set goals that excite you—and actually follow through? Expect to learn why some goals feel effortless and others feel like a chore, how the role of intentions plays into goal setting and how to stack them, what the practical differences are between default intentions and deliberate intentions, why SMART goals are overrated, what the big triggers of procrastination and aversion are and how to overcome them, how you can make your goals feel deeper and intention stickier and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get up to 20% off the leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Given all of the work that you've done, why is it that some goals feel effortless and others feel like a chore? Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And that was what I wanted to figure out with this book, because I find with my own life, I'm productive on a daily basis. I'm focused on a daily, as you would hope, given I study this stuff for a living, looking at the research for this stuff for a living. But there were still goals that kind of fell by the wayside for me. You know, the exercise equipment that was in the basement that I hadn't really followed through with, you know, things that didn't really fire me up inside that I found that I wasn't really accomplishing. And so that was what set me on this journey to write this book is seeing that we all have a sort of graveyard of forgotten goals. Every single person on the planet does. And so what is it that actually separates the goals that we're able to achieve and follow through with from. the ones that were not. And you, you, when you dig into the research on this topic, so I dug into the academic literature on this topic, I actually spoke with a lot of Buddhist monks who, you know,

know more about intentionality than almost any demographic, I would argue, even the scientists that study intentionality and goal attainment, all in an effort to untangle that web of essentially goal attainment, right? Why is it that we attain some goals and others, they feel, feel meaningless, we procrastinate on them, we kick them down the street for another day, or they're just not something that fires us up inside. And so you discover a web of factors. You discover, you know, procrastination is one angle, right? We procrastinate on some things when we follow through on others. Values are another angle, actually, where values my eyes have always glazed over when I've heard that, are you drinking there, by the way, looks good. This is a pretty looking

This is one of the rare times that I'm drinking something that I'm not sponsored by. Wow. This is a Bloompop. Hold on, by the way, everyone's like, fuck, I want to know what it is after procrastination. He was talking about values. So this is Bloompop. So my friend, Greg Levakia, he owns this company called Bloom. They do Greensrinks.

And this is like a poppy or an Olipop, if you're familiar with that. No. Is that a UK thing? No, I mean, Texas, dude. Oh, okay. I'm Canadian, though. Okay, maybe it hasn't got there. You guys have just received the fucking wheel.

Michael Jackson up. This Bloom Pop stuff fucking rips, dude. It's so tasty. I'm a massive fan of a chilled beverage. I'm a big chilled beverage guy. So highly recommend. This is the raspberry lemonade, and I'm not sponsored, but Greg was at my house for the Super Bowl,

and he brought around cases and cases of it. Oh, nice. Well, shame on him for not sponsoring. answering you, first of all. But yes, there's this web of things that affect how much, how many of our goals we attain from, you know, procrastination to values, to desire. There's a lot of science behind desire as well and social contagion. And so you discover just how many little nodes there are, but a lot of the little things that either lead us to do something or not, they, seem to orbit around both aversion, which leads to procrastination, as well as values, which

sounds like an incredibly fluffy topic, but I promise it isn't. There's real science behind that, too. Okay. Talk to me about the science behind values. Okay. Yes. So, whenever I hear the word values, my eyes have glazed over, because I think, you know, some corporate consultant will come in, and they'll give you a sheet of paper, and there's 100 values on it. And this is exactly what comes to my mind when I've heard it. And there'll be a hundred words on the page and they'll say, circle the, the things that you value most on this page. And there will be words like humor and grace and love and health and fitness, you know, all the things that we all care about. And so, you know, part of me will want to circle the whole page because I think, how can I be against any of this stuff? But all you

you have to do to figure out values is go to Google Scholar and type in values, the research does come right up. There is incredible research, in my opinion, that was started by Shalom Schwartz. He's probably the world's foremost expert on values in the world, where essentially there are 12 different fundamental motivations that we all have on a deep and fundamental level. So these vary from, you know, looking at you, your self-direction, right, would be one aspect. Accomplishment is another strong value for a lot of people. But they vary, right? Pleasure is a fundamental human value as well, which is one of my highest.

Self-direction and pleasure are my highest. So I love going my own way, doing my own thing, thinking my own thoughts, but I love a gigantic plate of butter chicken at the end of the day, for example. So we all have a different combination of these 12 values. From self-direction to conformity is actually a fundamental value, to tradition, humility

is a fundamental value as well, to benevolence, so kindness, universalism, which is protecting the welfare of people and of nature. I have the wheel in front of me here, so I'm cheating a little bit with the ones I miss. So self-direction stimulation, which is loving

novelty. Pleasure, which is called hedonism in the research, but that has a lot of, you know, sultry connotations, I guess. Achievement power is a fundamental human value. Curious, it's lowest overall, cross-culturally, especially. Face is a value, so how you come across to other people, that's what that means. Security is a fundamental value. So that's personal security and societal security. That's been going up in recent years. Tradition got that. conformity, I think I mentioned, yeah, humility, universalism, and benevolence. So these 12 fundamental values, we are all a distinct combination of these 12. We have some in spades, like for me, self-direction and pleasure slash hedonism, and some are super low for us. So power is one of my

lowest value. Conformity is one of my lowest. Tradition is one of my lowest. And, you know, like attracts likes. So we're probably very similar. Listeners are. probably very similar in these regards. But we all have different values that are strongest for us. And these are what motivate us the most on a deep, fundamental

human level. Goals on values, though. No. No. So goals, the interesting thing about goals that I really started

to believe in speaking with the monks. You're right, goals are not values. But I think goals and values are both almost intentions in our life, right? Because a value is something that we intend to be over the course of our life, right? We intend to be somebody who is secure. And so that might lead us to different priorities, like fitness, for example. A lot of people invest in fitness for that value of security. Other people might value the accomplishment value in becoming fitter. Other people might, you know, to have a body that they feel proud of, for example. And goals are intentions as well, right? Because there's something that we plan to do over a longer period of time. And values our intentions as well,

because there's something that we intend to be. And so this is, this was the very interesting connection is, you know, an intention is just a plan that we're going to do something. And so, So values are a type of intention. Priorities are a type of intention, right, because there's something that we plan to be. They kind of live between our values and our goals. Goals are a type of intention because there's something that we plan to do. Priorities are goals and also the plans that we make are intentions and the things that we are on our to-do list on a daily basis are intentions. So this is the fascinating thing. This is why the book is called intentional. Because we have all these different layers of intention in our life.

And so by understanding these layers and how they can work together with one another, that becomes a superpower. That is one of the best things that we can do for goal attainment. Okay. Explain to me how all of these different things slot together. I imagine that you must have a hierarchy of the way that these things end up becoming a pyramid. Yes. Oh, yes. They are kind of shaped. like a pyramid because you can think of the, I'm flipping through the book. I don't know. What, what's the ratio between how many people listen to these things versus watch your interviews? Now that you can do video on Spotify, the audio platforms aren't even insulated from having to look at us.

So it's, it's pretty high. I mean, if you, even just YouTube versus Spotify is nearly pretty 50-50. There's a lot. Audio's huge. Yeah. Audio is actually probably about 60%. But, um, Yeah, it's a lot of people will be looking, but you might have to describe what you're about to show for the people you want. I was just flipping through the book while you were chatting, and there's one of my wife's hairs on the book for some reason. So this is something in the book that I call the intention stack. It's flipped on my screen, but it'll probably flip that. It looks right. Okay, perfect.

So you can see, how's this for production quality, holding up a picture from... Elite, absolutely elite. This is top tier, S-tier production. quality right here. So you can see that the width of one of our intentions is how long we express it over, right? So at the very bottom of this, it's kind of shaped like a funnel almost. We have our present intentions. These are the things that are on our to do list, right? You know, we have a tiny intention to tie our shoelaces to go for a run or something. And then we have above the present intentions. Now you got me all self-conscious because so many people watch your podcast. And I think,

how are my nails today? Because my nails are... You look fantastic. So above the present intentions we have are our plans, which are a bit broader. So a present intention to tie your shoelaces might fit into a plan to go for a run. And that might fit into even something broader than that, which is a goal, to run a marathon in a certain amount of time, which might fit into a broader intention. And than that called a priority, which might fit into becoming ultra-fit, which might fit into a value, which we talked about. So fitness value, it actually varies depending on gender, which is interesting for fitness-type priorities, where as women are more likely to see becoming fitter as an expression of pleasure,

right, because they feel better in their bodies, whereas men tend to err more on other values like security, right, feeling strong and stable in their body, as well as values like accomplishment. So this is what I call the intention stack in the book where there's this beautiful alignment that can happen when we have a goal that we set, which is kind of a medium term intention in our life, when that is aligned with a value, that becomes far, far more motivating than a goal that isn't. So, you know, to keep with the fitness example. I think a lot of us build our fitness goals around the value of face, right? How we come across to other people, right? I want six-pack abs by beach season so I can look

incredible, whatever it might look like. I like butter chicken too much for goals like that. Had like a true Canadian. Yeah, yeah, Putin, beaver tails, you know, hit all the Canadian staples. Putteen is actually, you know Putin, right? Yeah. Okay, okay, good. I'm happy that that is one of our strong cultural exports. But if you don't value face, that goal to look a certain way by a certain amount of time, that's not going to be motivating for you. And you're going to find that you have this headwin for the goal all throughout the process where if you value security or benevolence, for example, having a goal to develop an incredible cardiovascular system. for longevity and to be able to play with your grandkids late age, whatever it might look like, that's far more aligned to not only your values, but because your values make up who you are, there's that motivational alignment too, and so goals feel far more effortless in that way. A quick aside, if you've noticed your energy isn't quite what it used to be, even though you eat

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Yeah, so that's the interesting thing about intention. So intention at the same time is not only the key to accomplishing our goals, it often leads us to not accomplish our goals. So we have the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? And it's because, and I've really started to see goals as something, different over the course of writing this book and chatting with the scientists, but also more so chatting with the Buddhist monks in writing this book, where there's kind of a reframe, I think, that we have to go through with the goals that we set, where we see a goal as something that we are

going to accomplish or that we should compare our results to, right? But I've started to view goals, and I think this is a much better frame for them, as often. almost a prediction, right? Every goal is a prediction at where you believe your current and your planned actions will take you, right? And so, so often those predictions, those goals, which are really predictions in disguise, they turn into expectations for how things will go, which then turn into disappointment when we inevitably aren't predicting the future properly, which we're horrible at predicting the future, right? We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone a week. We don't know if the hot water tank is going to break in our house

and flood our basement and upend all over. We don't know if a kid is going to, you know, get sick and have to stay home. We don't know how things are going to end up. But when goals are just predictions in disguise, I really think we have to internalize that idea and edit our goals as we go on, right? Because we develop this attachment to how we believe things are going to go. And so we set a goal, we develop an attachment to it, turns into an expectation, which turns into inevitable disappointment usually, to take New Year's resolutions, for example, which have mostly fallen by the wayside by the time people will listen to this podcast or watch it. You know, 92% of us fail at the New Year's resolutions we make because we set them with these

beautiful hosts, right? We're like you know that classic trope of somebody who just arrived in New York City and they, you know, she hops off the bus and she's got this big smile on her face and then you know cut to a year later when

all the future that she didn't predict ends up happening and then, you know, she's in her one bedroom apartment looking all sad or something. The same thing happens with our goals because they really are predictions in disguise. So holding them a bit more loosely. And I think editing them and dropping them is also a really helpful strategy.

Seeing them is not something that's fixed, but that we need to revise over time and then often drop when they're not working out is an incredible strategy for actually following through with them because we get closer to what we actually want. There has to be a difference between default intentions and deliberate intentions, though. Yeah. Yeah. And this was, a surprising thing that really came up in the research where you think of an intention as being always deliberate, right? You know, we intend to do something so we do it or not, right? A lot of the time. But there really are these two types of intentions. So like I was saying a little bit ago, an intention is just a plan that we're going to do something. And we set plans to do things

both automatically, right, which are called habits, right? So you wake up in the morning and maybe your phone wakes you up and so you tap, you swipe around between a few different apps and you respond to something. That's habit energy, which is what monks call, you know, just living on our default intentions. But eventually, a time will come when you snap out of those default intentions that you have. When you're lying in bed, you know, you're not really feeling what you're doing and so you think, okay, what do I really want here in this situation? What do I really want to get out of my day? What do I really need to accomplish? We all have these little moments of awakening where we go from being on autopilot mode, just doing things in response to

whatever is happening around us, to tapping into something that is called our self-reflective capacity, which is our ability to look inward to where we really wish to be going, what we really want to be getting out of a situation. And interestingly, so we go from living on default intention to these deliberate intentions, and we snap out of just this autopilot mode and really decide where to go. It's quite a beautiful transition, actually. The more we do that, the more deliberately intentional we become and the more we end up accomplishing of what we want, right? We need these moments of awakening. Where do our defaults come from? Oh, I love these questions. They come from a lot of different places. So I remember early on in the writing journey asking a monk, where do intentions

come from in general? And he listed a lot of different sources that actually mapped on top of the research from the social environments that we're a part of, right? We have this phenomenon of social contagion where, you know, there's the classic saying, we're the average of the five people we spend our most time with. We have our desire to avoid pain and experience greater pleasure. We have, you know, and so that leads us to, you know, walk up and say hi to somebody at a cafe or just connect with somebody or go on Tinder, whatever it. looks like, right? But we have our biology too, which, you know, is probably connected a little bit with the Tinder example. But, you know, we're on a road trip, for example, and we feel the urge

to go to the washroom. And so we set an intention to stop at the next, you know, rest stop, for example. But we also have, so those are the more default places that intentions tend to come from. But then we have this gradient where we transition from living on default, living on autopilot, mode, just not really achieving the goals that we set, but, you know, doing fine. We're kind of maintaining the life that we have. We go from being on deliberate or default autopilot mode to being more deliberate about what we do. So one of those places that intentions come from are the lessons we've learned, right? So you listen to an incredible book, a great podcast, you read a book, you listen to Chris or the other Chris me, you know, sharing ideas or whatever it might look like,

you learn something. And what that does is it puts a learning loop in your mind so that when you encounter the same situation in the future, you'll respond with a different intention from the one that you had originally. And the deepest ones come from a place beyond that, right? I think one of the times I was on in the past, you know, we were chatting about scatter focus, It's this mind wandering mode where we just let our mind roam free, and we find that it wanders to the future a remarkable amount of time. 48% of the time that our mind is wandering, it's thinking about the future. So we're taking a shower, for example, or we're going for a run, we're going for a walk,

and we're listening to classical music or something with a notepad in our pocket. And we always unearth ideas. We always unearth plans. and we always tap into this intentional capacity that's in our mind to set different intentions from the ones that we would be doing on default. So it looks very interesting in practice where often becoming more intentional to break out of the mold, it looks like more wandering sometimes because that gives us a different way to go than the one that we would be inclined to do by default.

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dot SH slash modern wisdom, use the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom 10 at checkout. It's interesting the difference between giving yourself enough room so that you can actually allow ideas to come to the surface. You can't white knuckle creativity to the line that I love. so it sort of needs to emerge spontaneously. But also that gets perilously close to not taking the wheel, which is just living on default intentions and not really having that much structure

and not really choosing the direction that you're going in or taking agency. Life happens to you. You don't happen to life. And yeah, I think a lot of people struggle with the tension between structure and sort of serendipity might be a good way to put it from a cognitive standpoint. Yeah, and it's very interesting the little gaps in our day as well, where that's sometimes where our greatest intentions come from. You know, it's in these little moments between things. So, you know, if we're having a conversation,

if right after this conversation we pick up our phone or something, you know, intentions might never occur to us that would be, incredibly valuable to us both. If you're walking to a meeting or something, right, you're at your office or something, you're walking to a different office in your building, and on the way there, you're on your phone, intentions aren't going to occur to you because you don't tap into this wandering boat. So there really are these two levels of wandering where we have the little gaps in between the things that we do, right? Especially before and after we do something. That's sometimes the most fruitful time to wander

because beforehand you set an intention because you're thinking about the future and the impending thing is so front of mind that you're more likely to wander to it for about, you know, than about half the time. It's probably closer to 75, 80% of the time

that you'll be thinking about the future, just automatically setting intentions. And after two, it's the learning loop where you can set different intentions or think of action items from a meeting or something as simple as that. Or you have a meaningful conversation at a coffee shop with a good friend or something. So you can reflect on it on the walk back home instead of just filling your attention to the brim or distracting yourself.

You can actually internalize something that leads you to set different intentions later on. And so the default intentions that we have, a lot of them are habits. But we need some reinforcement mechanism almost so that the more deliberate things we do can change our defaults, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I think I got a bit of stick for suggesting that New Year's resolutions are important on a podcast a couple of months ago. I'm not saying that there's anything special particularly about January 1st, but the point that I did think was kind of interesting is that people are already obsessing over the future and ruminating about the past. They're just doing it in an unstructured way.

Yeah. Right? It's just invading your life. It careens into consciousness. You don't know where it came from. You don't know how long it's going to linger. You can't get rid of it. And then it leaves.

And you go, well, I guess that was kind of like me. planning and reflecting, except for the fact that it felt bad, I didn't mean it to happen, I was supposed to be doing something else, and it wasn't in any way productive or contributing to my life. Like, okay, why don't we then, every so often just take a little bit of time, take a downbeat? But speaking of that, you know, 10 years resolutions, kind of one of the go-to garden variety productivity tools, smart goals are another one, and you seem to take a a bit of issue with smart goals, something that every business undergrad from all time has become familiar with. What's your issue with smart goals? Yeah, seriously. I actually have

never had an issue with them until I encountered the research on them. So I personally thought smart goals would be a shoe-in for this book. And because I've written about them in the past, they sound incredible, right? These goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound smart. It sounds like it should work, right? You know, they're smart. Why would you set dumb goals or something? Then you look at the research on them where, and if you don't believe me, you know,

and I hope to actually stir up a bit of controversy with this. I can't wait for the productivity community to be up in arms. They'll be using the fucking Alfred extensions and their notion templates to send you big long arguments about why smart goals are actually underrated and overrated. They're going to have their keyboard maestro scripts automatically interact with Claude co-work to do a deep research into just what's wrong with me or something. I don't know. But it's so interesting because I thought they'd be a shoe in for the book, right?

Aren't specific goals incredible? Don't we want our goals to be attainable, that sort of thing? But when you look at the research, and if you don't believe me, go to Google Scholar and type in smart goals. You'll see what comes up. You might be as surprised as I was. It turns out realistic goals often aren't good enough, right? We're limiting our potential when we make a goal merely realistic. Because when we make a goal challenging, the research shows we actually achieve more than we would otherwise by simply making it kind of a low-hanging bar or something. something that we can just step over. And there's also redundancy in the criteria, right? So aren't

specific, aren't measurable goals also specific, for example? And I looked into the research on where did this actually come from? And it came from, the smart goals originated as an article in a management review. It wasn't an academic journal. It was just kind of an article somebody wrote on how to better manage your employees. And it didn't stand for what the current acronym does today. And so it's kind of like the 10,000 step rule or the 10,000 hour rule, these nice kind of things that sound like they should work. And so there's a virality that's associated with it that, you know,

kind of gets morphed in a cultural game of telephone ever since they were introduced. And so this was actually quite a big surprise for me, because these sounds so good. And I remember, you know, encountering this research, writing about it in the book. I actually had a little bit of a chapter drafted about Smarkles. But I thought, okay, I need some research backing here. You know, did a deep dive into the research and found that there's, you know, a lot of researchers say that there's even research waste that occurs around Smarkles because it seems like they make

sense to study. So many businesses do them. I can't wait to hit the speaking circuit for this book and tell every business. Ruin everyone. Yeah, exactly. Really just, you know, cause controversy within all these companies and stuff. Productivity controversies are probably the lowest stakes and least important controversy you can ever imagine. I don't know.

There's some political ones at the moment that seem equally stupid. But, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's stupid controversy and enough of it to go around it. at any given time in this kind of outraged, driven algorithmic world that we're in. But, yeah, smart goals, maybe we should have something because then we could set actually better goals that are rooted in not only our values, right? We can edit our goals over time so that they're better fit for our values. We can actually overcome a lot of the things that are getting in the way of our goals too,

like a lack of alignment with the social environments we're a part of like procrastination, which is another huge, huge inhibitor to just how much we're able to accomplish in our day, in our life. Yeah, let's talk about procrastination. Like I have to assume procrastination gets in the way for lots of people. There's a thing. They understand their intention. It hasn't got slippery. It hasn't dropped out of their mind.

And for some reason, the thing that they need to do in order to move themselves toward achieving. the intention, for some reason, they can't get started or they keep on stopping or something. So what did you learn? Procrastination, big picture. Yeah. So big picture, very big picture. There are, for any goal, we have this function of desire where we either desire doing it, which is usually aligned with our values actually. So the more aligned something is with what we value, that's our motivational nature, our unique motivational nature, I should say. And so that's the desire component, the values component. But then there's the aversion component where to get how much you actually care about something or want to do something, you have to subtract how much aversion you

have to do it from the amount of desire. And sometimes we end up in the negative. And so there's a lot of goals that we don't want to follow through with. There's a negative amount of energy around that goal. and so we punt it down the street for a later day. It's called procrastination. But the interesting thing about procrastination is it's a purely visceral and emotional reaction to something that we don't want to do. There's very little logic embedded within it whatsoever. So it turns out that there are certain triggers that a task can have that lead us to a greater amount of aversion, which leads to procrastination. So those are whether something is boring. More boring something is the less we want to do it. Frustration is another one. So the process of doing something is very frustrating.

Unpleasiveness, right? It's just something is just not pleasant to do. When something's far away in the future, right? The further away something is, the less we desire to do it because we can justify to ourselves. We don't feel, you know, the impending deadline of having to do it. When something is unstructured as well, that's another trigger of procrastination. And the interesting thing about that is that one kind of frustrates me because, you know, you can structure things. You know, if you feel aversion for that reason, you know, if you don't want to go to the gym because you have no workout plan or something, that's very, solvable, right? The other ones are kind of uglier, they're messier.

Taking through the list from the top again. Yes, so boring, frustrating, unpleasant, far away in the future, unstructured, and the final one is meaningless. So it's not aligned with our values, which we've covered. Okay. What are the easiest solutions for people? Some of those feel a little redundant, like boring, frustrating? meaningless. They feel, I don't know where we're playing semantic games here, but they seem a little similar.

What's the 80-20 of people overcoming procrastination? Is something unstructured? Structure it. That's the lowest hanging fruit for procrastination. And usually you'll find when you cross-reference, and you're right, there is overlap. There is some debate in the research on whether these or distinct characteristics of tasks.

But generally, you know, you can kind of, because you'll find that when something's aversive, it sets off multiple ones, right? You don't want to do your taxes because they're boring, they're unstructured, they're frustrated, they're unpleasant, and so you procrastinate, maybe they're, you know,

you kick them down the street for a later day. But structuring things is some of the lowest hanging fruit you can do for, so how could you add structure to doing your taxes? Can you just hire somebody to do it, right? Delegating something is the easiest way to overcoming procrastination on it when it's something that's delegatable. So add structure and go back to goal editing, right? If you have a goal that's really aversive for you, but it's still on your list and you really see the tangible payoff of having done it, right? Not of doing it, not the enjoyment of doing it, but the tangible payoff of having done it, edit the goal so it's more in line with your values, right?

turn the goal from that six-pack abs by beach season face goal into that goal of, you know, having a feeling secure in your body that your heart isn't going to attack you in retirement or something, right? Connect with the deeper meaning behind it and connect with that, you know, your top two values, for example. But also, you know, make it, do what you can to make it an actual enjoyable process for you. And this goes back to the unstructured nature of a goal. But also unpleasant, presumably. Yeah, also unpleasant, also boring, you know, frustrating, you know, a few of these different

things at once. Can you do it over, I don't know, a fancy latte? Can you do, can you, you know, have a resistance list? This is one of my favorite productivity strategies where, you know, make a list of everything you're resisting doing and then a set of rewards that you can treat yourself when you do those things, right? maybe assign a number of points that you can redeem for those rewards or something. I call them habit points in the book.

So, you know, there are ways of making the process more enjoyable, making a game out of something that you don't want to be doing. So upping that enjoyment level, however you possibly, having a glass of wine or whatever that colorful drink is that you're having while you're doing. And saving it for that period of time, habit stacking, right? where you invest in the habits that you are kind of like guilty pleasures almost on some level. Investing in those when you do the averse of things. But there's so many different overcoming the resistance level we have to things that we can do.

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Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom. What about the... I get... I'm thinking about stuff that's just going to... to be tough that you're just sort of facing and there's not really anything the sacrifice reward dynamic there's no way around this and it's just going to suck i guess you could try and stack listening to

good music that you enjoy at the same time you could go to the coffee shop to try and make it a little bit easier uh i'm just wondering how people can how many times is someone right i've got my favorite song on i've gone to my favorite coffee shop my latte and fuck i opened instagram shit Whoops. Yeah. And so this comes down to often giving yourself no choice but to do something. So, you know, Freedom is one of my favorite apps on the computer for this reason. And I'm not affiliated, much like you and that drink. You know, this podcast should be sponsored by, what's the name of it again?

Bloompop. Bloompop. And Freedom. Freedom is one of my favorite apps. So are you familiar with it? Do you use it? I use cold turkey, which I think is something similar. Yeah, same difference. Freedom, cold turkey. I think self-control is another one where essentially you disable access to a lot of the things that you find more attractive than the thing that you really ought to be doing than the thing that you want to be doing over a broader

period of time. So personally, whenever I write, I find I gravitate the things that are more interesting than writing. I'll want to check my email one more time. I'll want to, you know, fire up social media. I'm not, you know, big into social media, but sometimes I'll fire up social media, see what my friends are up to, check the news, you know, whatever might look like. And so freedom disables the things that are more attractive on your computer than what you ought to be doing. You can specify a block list ahead of time. So even if you want to access these things, have to restart your computer if it's in the time period that you specify. Another one of my favorite habits is aversion journaling. So what I'll do is I'll grab my notepad, which is always

by my side as I work in my pilot precise V5 RT pen, which, you know, as long as we're throwing productivity, fire out there or whatever, trying to cause controversy, this is the best pen available. You can come out. pen available. Yeah, it's the best pen available. What makes it the best pen? Oh, have you tried writing with a, what's it called? Pilot Precise V5RT, Chris? No, no, tell me about it. What's the experience like? Oh, well, well, it won't come through it video, right? You need to, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the same as who's your girlfriend in school and it's like, oh, she goes to a different school, you wouldn't know. Hey, no, no, no, no, no, I promise, I promise. It costs like $2,000. People can try for them, so you'll never go back.

My wife and I got in an argument one time because I said, I know what the best pen is. And she said, no, I know what the best pen is. And we had this argument before sharing what pen we were talking about. It turns out we were both talking about the pilot Precise V5RT. But what I'll do with the pilot precise V5RT is rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? It is, I'll grab the notepad and I'll do some, I call it aversion journaling, where when I find that I'm resisting doing something, I'll write down why. And it won't, sometimes it'll be as methodical as going through each of the triggers.

You know, is it boring? Yeah, is it frustrating? No, but it's really boring. So I'll go through the triggers sometimes. Or it can be more loosey-goosey, more casual. You know, I'll just grab the notepad and start writing, why do I find this thing so ugly? and what can I do about it to counterbalance that ugliness, right? To make it less aversive. And I always leave with some tactical thing that I can do to make it less ugly for myself. And if not that, my relationship with a change is a little bit. I understand what makes it so aversive.

And so give yourself a choice to either do some aversion journaling or do the thing. And so eventually the time will, and you'll gravitate to the journaling at first, but you'll end up untangling the knots that you have to doing something and overcome that resistance to doing it. It's an interesting tactic, but it works almost without fail for me personally. It might, I think it will for readers, listeners, too. viewers. What about the difference between ugly goals and attractive goals? Because there's some, again, I'm trying to think about as much objection handling as possible. There are some things that are just funner goals than others. There are some goals that are uglier and some goals that are more attractive. Yeah. It's just every goal is a bit different on that fundamental level. And so,

you know, often you'll edit a goal and you'll get it to as good in good as shape as you possibly can. And it's still ugly. It's still thugly in a lot of cases. And so you got no choice at that point to decide, is this goal worth pursuing? And sometimes the fact that you have tried to edit a goal extensively and you still find it ugly, you know, sometimes that's a sign that it could be worth dropping when it's just fundamentally not aligned to who you are and what you care about. But then you have the goals on your list that's like, you know, lower my cholesterol or something, which probably few people want to do, but if your cholesterol is high, you should probably do it. And so then you have the goals that you really ought to be achieving. And so the litmus test is, you know, is thinking,

okay, will I be happy that I did this thing? And what tangible difference will it make to my life? And life because, and I forget who said it, but somebody said, you know, for our days, for our days to be different, our life needs to be different. I think, you know, you can kind of transpose those for our life to be different. Our days need to be different. What do your goals look like on a tangible daily basis? Because another trap we fall into a lot of times, and I call them sepiotone goals, where we have these beautiful fantasies of just exactly how different our life will be after we integrate a change into our life. The one that comes up for me is waking up at 5.30 every morning. So I love this idea of being an early rise, you know.

And I've struggled and I've integrated this goal into my life several times actually where I'll wake up at 5.30. I'll do all these, you know, things that feel like they should be good in my head. I'll meditate like I usually do when I wake up. I'll go to the gym. I'll read the paper. I was going to say still get the physical paper, but I'm not that old. I read the physical paper, though, that arrives every morning. You know, all these holy things with the morning.

But then I realize that I absolutely hate the ritual, right? I have to go to bed in order to get a good enough sleep. when people want to hang out, when good hockey games are on, when shit's actually happening that's interesting in my life. And so there's this idea of a change sometimes that is sepiotoned that leads to these tangible changes that we don't really actually want. And by the way, for waking up early, if you're a night owl like I am, that actual research on it, I believe by Till Ronenberg has found that there's no difference in somebody's socioeconomic standing based on their wake-up time. So people who wake up at 8 a.m. are just as successful as people who wake up at

5 a.m. But it's how deliberate, how intentional we are with our time that makes the biggest difference. You know, still wake up at, you know, 7.30, 8, read the paper, meditate. Just, everything is just shifted over. Do you think, how many goals do you think people have that? are just kind of socially acceptable causeplays of ambition. I think so many people love the idea of saying that I have this goal. Maybe the reason that lots of people aren't achieving their goals and their intentions is that if they were to look a little bit more closely, they'd realize that they weren't theirs. They're doing it is this sort of cool, trendy t-shirt that they can wear, that when other people

ask them what their goals are, they can say, oh, I'm doing a keto diet, or I'm doing a keto diet, or I'm doing meat and fruit at the moment, or I'm microdosing, you know, I'm doing, but that's not actually what they want, it's what they want other people to hear them saying that they want. Yeah, yeah, I'm microdosing meat and fruit, you know, whatever it is.

That's such a big part of it. And so, you know, one tactic that I'm a big advocate for is keeping a list of your goals. And I divide mine based on context. So personal and work and inside, I list the goals under the values that they're a part of. And when I started doing this, I did realize that there were a lot of goals on the list, like waking up early is one of them, where I feel it's still interesting, you know,

the guilt that we experience when we don't follow through with the expectations that other people have of us, like waking up early. So I know all the research, and I know what works for me. I know what my biological prime time is, which is when we're wired to perform. I know all these things. I know I have a better life. I enjoy life more. I do better work. I create better things when I wake up later. But still, I feel guilty when I roll out a bed at a later hour than whatever I deem justifiable in my head. And so there is this, you know, I love the cosplay. phraseology that you use. And it's interesting because I feel our relationship is different depending on our values in that context, where conformity is one of the fundamental human values. Some people do value conformity. And so if that's you, which is probably unlikely if you're listening to this podcast, but I was hanging out with a couple people last night who's, they identified that as one of their

highest values, which I found interesting. But if that's a high value for you, and there's a goal that other people expect you to achieve, what the research shows is you will actually find it meaningful to achieve that thing, because you're living within the expectations that other people have of you. But if you don't have that value, which it's low for me, it's probably low for you, too, knowing you to some extent, you're not going to find much meaning. And, you know, for me, my value of self-direction is so highest, the highest by a wide, wide margin. And my value of conformity is so low that if I feel I have to do something, that'll make me not want to do it. It'll make me want to rebel against the expectations of other people have of me. But there still is

that fundamental guilt. So it really is a, you know, so it's, so it's, it's a, you know, so, it's, kind of like when you ask somebody how, you know, has work for you and they say, oh, I'm so busy. You know, I have so much going on where the busyness, you know, people overestimate how long they work for, first of all. But second of all, they wear that busyness is almost a badge of honor of, you know, oh, the, the world needs me so much, you know. And I'm so wanted by the world, so needed by the world. So I'm so busy. We have kind of a similar status projection with our goals sometimes. But, you know, tapping into that, that's what makes tapping into that self-reflective capacity just so much more important. If we never tap into our self-reflective

capacity, we'll never truly get what we want. This episode is brought to you by Woop. I've been wearing Woop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters, sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable, 7% smaller, but now it's also got a 14-day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging. It's got hormonal insights for ladies. I'm a huge, huge fan of Whoop. That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with.

And best of all, you can join for free. Pay, nothing for the brand new whoop 5.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you do not like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Woop 5.0 and that 30-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.com.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.comwop.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I suppose, look, social pressure is a hell of a improver. It's a hell of a assistance when we want to try and get

something done. It's why you train harder when you're in a class than when you're on your own, typically. I guess how can people make their goals and intentions feel deeper? There's certainly some that resonate with us a lot. And then there's others that don't so much, but we wish that they did. Is there something we can do to make goals sort of feel deeper? Yeah. So the values component is one, and that's a big one. And there is, you know, you're touching on the social environments that we're a part of. There are kind of a lot of productivity extremists out there, I call them, you know, people who, you know, they'll say never surround yourself with people who don't support you and your goals. But life is just more complex than that. You know, we have good friends that have bad habits, you know, speaking personally. when I'm around family. A lot of their, I'm not going to call anyone out, but a lot of their habits aren't conducive to, you know, the goals that I have.

But still, I'd be cold and heartless to weed them out of my life for, you know, some. But there is kind of positive social contagion that I think we can introduce for a lot of our goals, where if you have a big new goal, a big new habit that you're trying to integrate into your life, you can really reflect, okay, how can I actually double down on how much contagion I'm experiencing for this goal? And so there is that level of deliberateness that we can layer on top of whatever that goal is. Where is, can I join a running group, you know, if my intention is to, you know, get a certain workout time or a certain runtime? If you're joining a knitting group, you know, group, right? I used to be a bigger knitter than I am right now, and I wanted to get more into it

because it's a great way to scatter your... Knitting group. Yeah, yeah, and so it's all like a meetup for people to knit. Yeah, and there's a knitting store in the city that I used to live in. I'm not a good knitter, you know, by any stretch, but I found it a great way. I love the smirk that you have right now. It's like, I'm blown away by the fact that there's people getting together, like CrossFit on an evening. Oh, yeah. Cross knit. Yeah. Cross net. Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Yeah, well, I'm no good. Like, I can make dish claws and stuff, but when I was a part of the knitting group in, in the city that I used to live in, man, like my level of improvement with that habit was a different curve than it is right now. If anything, it's, I'm kind of letting the habit die right. There's a knitting store in the city that I used to live in,

which hosted this kind of meetup. All, you know, older women. and some of my favorite people in the world, we're in that group. And so, you know, having that social contagion because it can really support you in the habits that you want to form, that's one way to make it deeper. Nothing feels deeper in our life than human-to-human connection. All right. Taking all of this together, what's the structure? Someone is brought into the fact that intentions are important. They realize that procrastinations there. They've got goals. They've got actions. They've got daily, daily purpose, all the rest of this stuff. What's the best way to put this into a format to follow? How should people design better intentions? Yeah. So it's interesting. Something

that I really believe now is becoming more intentional is a skill that we can get better at overtime. So, you know, if you look at your level of follow-through, the book was originally called follow-through, but it has a weird, weird connotations in the UK that I was not aware of. You're probably familiar with them, right? Follow-through, yes, yeah. Yes. People can go on Urban Dictionary in their own time. But if you're looking to increase your level of follow-through with your goals, I should say, it'll make sense when you look it up. That was like totally out of left feel for me having to rename the book because it's such a good, it was such a good encapsulation. It was originally called follow through. Yes, it was. Wow. That was a bit, well, no, you only need to rename it in the UK.

It would have been fine in the US. Yeah, in the US, it would have been fine. The UK publisher really, right. And marketing is so awkward when you have differently named books. I'm fortunate that only my subtitles have been different across geographies. But realize that increasing your level of follow-through is really a skill that you can get better at over time. So maybe you set goals, you set intentions right now. Maybe for a given goal you follow through with it, let's say the default, right?

8% of the time we follow through with our New Year's resolutions. Maybe when you resolve to do something big, you follow through with it 8% of the time. But you can build this skill of intentionality and you can build these practices of intentionality. for, you know, there's the obligatory, ugly stuff, lowering your cholesterol, you can deploy the procrastination habits on those. So just looking to get started on something, one of my favorite tactics out there is shrinking your resistance level to doing things.

So if you're writing a book, for example, and you have freedom on or something, cold turkey on, but you're still resisting it, you can shrink how long you do it for until you overcome that resistance, right? It adds structure, it makes it less boring, less frustrating, all that stuff. So you might think, okay, do I want to write for an hour? No way in hell. What about 45 minutes? No. What about 30? What about 20? I could write for 20. And so you

overcome that resistance by shrinking how long you do something for being kinder to yourself in the process. So the procrastination for the obligatory, ugly things, the procrastination tactics are very helpful for those. But usually there's more latitude in editing our goals than we believe. So maybe there's some project that you don't want to do.

One example, maybe you have to write some employee handbook or something. And so, you know, on your to-do list, it's right employee handbook. Or maybe you're making the list of goals is right employee handbook. And that's aversive, right? It feels like something you have to do, which fits with that value of conformity. But maybe you added it, maybe your biggest value is benevolence, so helping other people. Maybe it's self-direction,

so going your own way. So a better goal, a better frame for the goal might be, you know, mentor new employees and get creative with the handbook project. So you might actually perform the same set of actions under each goal, but one feels like something you have to do that isn't aligned with what you value. The other feels like something that is actually connected with what truly motivates you on that deep fundamental human level. So know your top values as well. So, you know, we mentioned the 12 of them earlier in the podcast. Won't go through them again. We've already talked about them. But what top two are the strongest for you? And how can you align more of your goals to them? Right. The easiest way to tell if something,

if a priority, if a goal is aligned with your deepest values, is you've done it already, right? Because the best, most aligned goals, they feel effortless. They feel like just an extension of who we are. So, okay, that covers procrastination. Let's give it a little system for people. That covers procrastination on the ugly stuff, editing the stuff that can be framed differently, increasing your desire, right, modifying your social environments. but a big one where you see and you accommodate the different layers of intention in your life is setting intentions across multiple timeframes at once. One of my favorite rules for this is the rule of three.

But I'm trying to remember. I'm one of the past times we were chat. Did I mention the rule of three? Maybe. Give us it again. Okay. So all this is is, you know, at the start of every day, I like to start with the goal on daily basis,

because then you see kind of where the rubber meets the road, and you can begin to form different intentions. So at the start of the day, you fast forward to the end of the day in your head, and you ask yourself, what are the three main things I will want to have accomplished by the day's end? That's it.

Where are the three main things I'll want to have accomplished by the days end. And because you can only pick three, it forces you to prioritize what's on your plate. You have to choose three things that are important and everything else that isn't. But if you find the rule works every day, you might think, okay, what are three things that I want to accomplish this week, right?

Maybe in a work context and a personal context. So that when you set the daily intentions, you can look to the weekly ones and think, okay, how can these contribute to the broader plans that I have. So in this way, your daily intentions begin feeding into your plans. And so when you set your weekly intentions, you can look to your goal list, right? You can think how much of this stuff do I want to bite off today.

And so you begin to develop the different layers of intention that you have in your life. Your daily intentions fit with your weekly intentions, which fit with your plans, your goals, which can fit with your values as you edit them more over time. So this is kind of the skill that we can develop in setting better intentions over the longer arc of time and upping our level of follow-through, the goal kind, as well as our level of accomplishment, if that's something that you value. What do you think? I know the book's new.

Yeah. What do you think is something that people are overlooking from this big thesis that you've put together. You know, you've got the obvious things that people are going to zero in on, probably the insights around procrastination and ways to reframe intentions and stuff like that. But is there something that's a less sexy but powerful element that you think most people are overlooking? Yeah. I'll share my personal favorite. It is that our values are constructed out of our default intentions. So our default intentions, they form a shape. And so you can look at, and the shape is the values that we have. So you can look at all the things you do by default.

And there's always an underlying motivation behind the things that you do by default. Right? You have a default habit of meditating because that allows you to get closer to what you want with self-direction or, you know, you feel more secure in your mind. You feel calmer. You have habits to, you know, call friends, and that might connect with different values of benevolence and serving others. But even the simple things, right, overreating or something might fit with that biological need for security and not starving. So from the deeply, deeply ingrained to the default intentions that we form. So these form the framework of our values. And this might be too in the weeds for an answer to this question that's interesting,

but I think this is very underrated where our values are made out of the things that we do by default. And it's for this idea that I think our default intentions aren't, you know, they're not just something to get frustrated by. You know, oh, why do I? overeat or why do I do this, why do I do that, there's something on many levels to admire, right? We can observe ourselves acting through pure habit energy and, you know, playing with our kids on habit, whatever it might look like. And I think our default habits, you know, sometimes they're worth getting frustrated by and setting a different intention after something we've learned maybe or maybe after tapping into that self-reflective capacity.

But I think other times they're worth marveling at. We have all of these, frankly, in my opinion, beautiful default intentions that I think make us human, right? Because we're not only ingrained in a certain way to act in a certain way, but we also, you know, we can also admire the person that not only nature has formed, but also. that we have formed through the decisions that we've made in the past. And those deliberate intentions that we can layer on top of the defaults of our life, that's this wonderful way that we can go in a different direction and really guide ourselves and our lives to go in a different way. And goals are a big part of that, but values are a big part of that, priorities, plans, and daily intentions. So I just think marveling at our defaults is an underrated idea from the book.

Chris Bailey, ladies and gentlemen, why should people go to check out everything that you got going on? Oh, well, first of all, thank you for having me on the pot again. Intentional how to finish what you start is the name of the book. If you feel inclined to check it out, there's an audiobook too, if that's your style. Chris Bailey.com. That's where my news letter is and all the good stuff that you can find in the,

I don't know what you want to call it, the Chris Baileyverse, whatever. Yeah, thanks for having me on again. I got you, man. I appreciate you. I like your work. Keep on doing it. Oh, thanks, buddy.

Great to chat with you always. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case.

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