The One You Feed - How To Be Intentional and Finish What You Start with Chris Bailey

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

In this episode, Chris Bailey discusses how to be intentional and finish what you start. He explores how intentionality, values, and motivation shape our ability to set and achieve meaningful goals. Chris also introduces concepts like the “intention stack” and “sepia-toned goals,” emphasizing the importance of aligning actions with core values. The conversation offers practical tools for editing goals, balancing planning with action, and cultivating both deliberate and default intentions to create a more purposeful, fulfilling life. Take our quick 2-minute survey and help us improve your listening experience: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠oneyoufeed.net/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Importance of intentionality in achieving goals Challenges of goal-setting and the concept of "sepia toned goals" The "intention stack" framework connecting daily actions to broader values Understanding and identifying personal values and their polarities The role of desire and aversion in goal pursuit The concept of "goal editing" to align goals with personal values Distinction between outcome goals and process goals The significance of the learning phase in goal attainment Balancing planning and action to avoid productivity traps Cultivating a positive relationship with goals to enhance motivation and fulfillment For full show notes: click here! If you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Bailey, check out these other episodes: How to Break Free from the ‘More’ Trap and Find Balance in a Busy Life with Chris Bailey Chris Bailey on Focus, Productivity, and Meditation (2018) Getting Things Done with Charlie Gilkey David Kadavy on Getting Started By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: Shopify – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. Pebl – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at hipebl.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you you will certainly hear it a few more, but now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still-point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There's a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there's very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feed.net slash book. There's this kind of vicious cycle we fall into where the goal, which is really prediction,

turns into an expectation, which because we're so bad at predicting the future, turns into disappointment, then we set more goals. This is a cycle that we need to break out of. But there's usually a way to edit the goals that we have so that they're more in line with the values that we have. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Chris Bailey's been a guest on this show a number of times. He's a delightful person to talk to. And every time we talk, I end up with at least one idea that I keep thinking. about and this time it was this phrase sepia toned goals those goals that look amazing in our head but the actual day-to-day version of the goal is miserable I then told him a story about my zen teacher offering this class on luminous dreaming and I'm halfway to signing up before I pause and go wait should I really do that where does that fit and that moment is basically what Chris's new book is about

it's called intentional how to finish what you start and the heart of it is simple Don't just adopt goals, choose them. Put them in the context of your values and your life as it really is. We talk about the intention stack, the way values clash with each other, why planning can become a productivity trap, and how to build small islands of intention into your day, so you don't wake up and realize you've been on autopilot for weeks. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed.

We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it. But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now. It takes two minutes to do and really would be a huge help.

Go to one you feed.net slash survey. Again, that's one you feed. Dot net slash survey. Thank you so much. Hi, Chris. Welcome back. Buddy, how are you? It's been a little hot minute. It has been a hot minute, but as I was saying to you before we started, I think this is time number four, which puts you in pretty rare air. You're not at the top, but I bet you're in the top 10 percentile of. Oh, I'll take top 10 percent. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. I'll take it. I'll take top 10. percent nearly anything. Pretty much anything. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not debt or something. Well, I was going to say, it depends how you, how you want to consider that. However, your new book is called intentional how to finish what you start, which is right up our alley here at the one you feed, because we are all about sort of bridging this knowledge to action gap. And this book is a great addition to the ways we think about that. But before we get into it, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild, and they say in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, it was a very dramatic reading of the parable. I'm feeling dramatic today.

I read my audiobook last week, so I'm all about thinking about, yeah. Is your mind mush? It was. I think I'm recovered, but it certainly was. Anyway, what's that parable mean to you? Oh, it means not falling back on autopilot. To me, you know, there's these two modes that we go between constantly. This is very much front of mind for me right now, probably for obvious reasons. You know, there's the intentional mode that we have where we deliberately chart our own way forward. Then there's the autopilot mode that we so often fall back on. And this is not to put down the autopilot mode too much, because because habits are a big part of that. But usually when it comes to goal attainment,

when it comes to daily productivity, when it comes to getting what we truly want, becoming more intentional is the path to doing that. So that's what is activated in my mind when I hear the parable for the fourth time. Yeah, yeah, I think. Yeah, I love it. I love it every time.

It gets better every time. It gets better, the delivery. Now that I'm a professional audiobook narrator, you can tell the difference. You can tell the difference. Yeah. It's ironic that we're talking about this book today because our newsletter that is going out today is kind of about this very idea. It's about when are we adopting goals that we haven't really thought about, right?

We haven't really seen where they fit into our overall thing. It's just easy to take them on. You hear him. It's like, that sounds good. The example I give is my Zen teacher sent out a thing today. He's teaching a class on luminous dreaming. And I thought, oh, I should do that. That sounds really cool.

I've always wanted to kind of do that. I'm halfway into signing up before I'm like, hang on a second, right? And I think it's just easy to do this because we're just shown again and again other ways to be better, to be happier, to be all these different things. And this is really the central premise of the book, which is that deciding what to do before you do it, and I think putting some, intentionality, some thought into that decision is the key to finishing anything. Talk to me about that. Yeah. So intention is this very curious idea because we obviously don't always finish the things that we start. Right. We all have a graveyard of goals that are in our past. We have, you know, much like old exercise equipment litters the basement floor. We have an equivalent graveyard of goals

if only in our mind. It's so true what you're saying in your newsletter where so often the idea of a change is much more attractive than what we have to actually do to make that change of reality. What comes to mind for me was I love the idea of being an early riser. I love the idea of waking up at 5 a.m. at this honestly to me ungodly hour, to meditate, to go for a run, to read a good book. I still get the physical newspaper here in Ottawa every morning. That's my news consumption, you know, to read the newspaper.

So I love the idea of this goal. And so I integrate it into my life. And every single time, there's always these lessons that we seem to have to learn repeatedly for them to stick. This is one of them for me, where I have the routine that supposedly productivity dreams are made of, right? I wake up. I actually do all those things. And I realize that I hate my days. I have to go to bed when, you know, hockey games are on, friends want to hang out.

I have to wake up at this hour when I don't have a lot of energy. I have more energy later on in the day. And by the way, there's a lot of, if you're in this camp too, there's a lot of interesting research that shows that there's no difference in somebody's socioeconomic standing based on what time they wake up at. It's what we do with the hours of our day after we wake up. In other words, how intentional. intentional we are that make the difference in how well we do. And so we don't always follow through with what we start. But here's the thing. When we do follow through, when we do accomplish something, there was always an intention behind that. And so, in other words, intention matters with goal attainment, but not all intentions are created equal. And that introduces the art of becoming more intentional and finding ones that are more

motivating, constructing ones that are more motivating, but also true to the day-to-day change that we want so we don't have these sepia tone goals too. Seapia tone goals, that's a great phrase from your book. Tell me what that is. Yeah, it's these goals we love the idea of, right? So many goals are sexy, right? And so we set a goal to get six-pack abs by beach season. And then, you know, we end up, Speaking of the one you feed, we eventually find ourselves in a situation where there's okay, there's a funnel cake in front of me right now, but I got this long-term goal, whatever am I going to do? So we have these romanticized versions of a lot of different goals. Waking up at 530 would definitely qualify as a sepia tone goal in my case.

And we fall victim to these goals, which are really more generalized ideas of change than they are tangible changes. that we're making to our life. You know, there's this wonderful quote. I forget who says it. I forget the, but the idea behind it is that for our life to be different, our days have to be different. I think that's the key to keep in mind. The quote will come to me as you're reading the next question probably. Yeah, I think this is such a key idea. And I'm in the season of launching my book. So I'm thinking about it obviously all the time. I just read it last week. Yeah. But I've got a whole choice. chapter on this idea of motivational complexity. We just want a lot of different things.

And that's normal and that's part of being human. But some attempt to sort through that in a coherent way is really important. And I think your book does this great job of connecting a value, something that's deeply important to us all the way down to our day. And I think you call that the intention stack. So tell me about the intention stack because I really love this, that connection is so important both to our ability to be productive to do the things we want, but also to feel good about the things we're doing. Yeah. And thank you for reading the book. You know, in every publicity cycle, you got the people that read the book and you get the people that don't read the book. And the people who read the book, there's so much more fun to talk to.

And you actually respect your listeners' time. So people should realize that you do. Thank you. I do. It's my way of showing love to my guests and to my listeners. Yeah. And I really think it is a way of doing it. So this is the interest, well, this is one of the interesting things about intention to me is there are so many, when you actually look at the architecture of intentionality and the research behind this idea. of intention is there are a lot of levels in our life across which we can become more intentional. So we all kind of intuitively know this to some extent and we already have different words for these different levels of intention in our life. We have the day-to-day intentions that we

have, which we store usually on a to-do list. Right. A to-do list is really just a space for our stored intentions. Then we have the plans that we're making, right? Our calendars, stuff like that, just how we're going to spend our time in a timeline that's broader than our day-to-day. Then we have our goals, which ideally our day-to-day intentions and those plans feed into. Then we have the broader priorities in our life that ideally our goals fit into. And then at the very crown of this stack is our values, which, and there's actual research behind values, which I found quite interesting because you hear the word values a lot. And honestly, by the time,

I got to researching this topic, my eyes were kind of glazing over every time I heard the term values. But I thought, okay, maybe there's actual research here. Maybe there's actual science here. And it turns out there is, you know, what comes to mind when I hear the term values is some corporate consultant comes in and they have a sheet that has a hundred words on it. And they say, pick the words that you feel are your values. There's not a lot of science behind that, but there is science that says there are 12 fundamental human values that we all share but in different amounts. And so values are essentially our ultimate intentions. They're the ultimate goals that we're after in our life. And so for a goal to be considered complete, you can't just have a goal,

right, waking up at 5.30 every morning or some sepia tone thing. You need to realize how it will connect with the day-to-day life that you have and the plans that you have. And the plans that you have. but also the broader, call it a motivational architecture of our life, the things that drive us uniquely, because what motivates you won't be what motivates me, won't be what motivates whoever is listening, watching this right now. So that's the key to keep in mind. Different things motivate us compared to other people. So finding of those 12 fundamental human values that the research has identified, finding which ones are truest for us, that is the key. And you can connect all of these levels of intention in something that I call the intention stack,

which has all these layers positioned above one another. So our daily intentions, our plans, our goals, our priorities, and then our values. And the attention stack is the best thing I've seen that takes on. that thorny question that brings up all these things. What's a goal versus a plan? Yeah. Versus a value. And so the intention stat gives us a way to do that. And I also find the 12 fundamental human values very interesting and that they'll be more or less important to us. So I'm just going to read a couple of them. So people have a sense of what we're talking about. One might be conformity, security, self-direction, power, pleasure.

achievement. Those are some of the ones. And so we all value these things a little bit differently. And I do think, I agree with you, the 150 goal list is kind of a mess. It's a way of starting. But the problem that I always find is I'm like, I agree with all these. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't agree with any of these things? Circle the whole page. Exactly, which is useless. And so I have different methods of, you know, leading people towards their goals. But I like this 12 because it does just allow us to kind of go through and think about. The other thing that I like that you do here is you make the core idea that there are sort of two fundamental polarities on which our goals move on. Tell us about that. Yeah. So this is quite frankly the beautiful thing about values

in my view is so you have these fundamental motivations that we have in our life. And so one of the polarities is are we focused on enriching other people or enriching ourselves? That's the first polarity. And the other polarity is are we focused on conserving things as they are, so basic conservatism, or are we focused on progressing things, making things better or simply often changing things, right? Change is enough to satisfy that value, like in the case of the value of stimulation, where that's seeking novelty essentially in the moment. And what matters is that things are novel and different.

And so from these polarities, like you were saying, these 12 fundamental human values blossom out. So things that might involve ourselves might include power or achievement. Power being one of the lowest values across cultures and overall. But achievement being quite high, probably, especially for people, listen to this podcast. I would imagine self-direction is quite high as well. But then there's the the conserve values, right? Security, tradition, conformity would be another. There's the other

values that are about others which would include universalism, which is protecting, preserving the welfare of people and of nature, benevolence, basic kindness and serving others. And so the interesting thing to me is that from those two polarities, all the values, all the values block awesome outward, but there are a complete motivational continuum, these values. So there is nothing that we could ever do where the motivation behind that thing falls outside of these 12 values. And so often determining what we're going to do in the moment, we're often doing a tradeoff between these different values, right? So let's go back to the funnel cake. Funnel cake's good.

Yeah. Not plant that idea subconsciously in my own mind. It's not funnel cake season here in North America. That's the summer. So people are probably somewhat safe. We should be safe. Yeah. I'm not going to even entertain the idea of going to a restroom.

But let's say you have these competing goals, right? You have a body fat, last goal. But you also have, like you're saying, pleasure is a fundamental human value. Right? That's something you can value highly. In fact, of that list of values, self-direction is my top value. Pleasure is my second value. So in other words, I'm very motivated to experience a greater amount of pleasure in my life,

whether that be from food or a good spa day or whatever it might look like. And so there's always these values, these fundamental motivations that are behind the scene competing with one another, which is fascinating. So if you're focused on goal attainment, the book is essentially about, the science of goal attainment, you need to consider that motivational nature, which is our values. A couple of years ago, I had one of those. This should be simple moments, and it absolutely wasn't. We were bringing on a contractor who happened to live outside the U.S. and my very overzealous bookkeeper, that's my polite way of saying, she really cares about what she's doing and she works

hard to keep me in line, but she started asking me questions that I didn't even think to ask. Are they truly a contractor? What has to be in the contract? Who's handling taxes? What happens if we mess up compliance? And the truth is, I hate that kind of stuff. I mean, it is really hard to get me to care. And that's why Pebble caught my attention.

Pebble is an AI-powered global HR platform built for founders, HR leaders, and operators hiring and supporting teams around the world. They help you hire, pay, and manage talent in over 185, countries and the onboarding can happen in minutes. Instead of having to stitch together like we did separate tools for contracts, payroll, compliance benefits, Pebble brings it all into one place with build-in guidance and local expertise so you can stay organized and reduce risk without becoming an HR or compliance expert. And the pricing is straightforward. Their discounted standard pricing is $399 per month per employee. Go to highpebble.com.

A.I. to get a free estimate. That's H-I-P-E-B-L-A-I for a free estimate. Starting something new is always really difficult because we get caught up in the stories of what if it doesn't work out or what if I put time into this and it fails? And I felt all that when Chris and I started this podcast, but I'm so glad that I did start, that I started taking positive steps towards something that mattered. And so if you're thinking of building a business, Shopify makes that leap a lot less chaotic. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and about 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From brands you already know like all birds and hinds to people just getting started. You can use their templates to get a great-looking store up fast.

It has AI tools that can help you write product descriptions, headlines, and even help improve your product photos. And when you're trying to get the word out, you can run email and social campaigns without needing a whole marketing team. Boy, I wish this had been around when we started. And if you get stuck, Shopify's got 24-7 support. So it's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash feed. Go to Shopify.com slash feed. That's Shopify.

com slash feed. There's something called a values wheel, I think it is. And it's got some version of the human goals. Maybe it's these. Maybe it's something different. But it's close. Where they are on the wheel is sort of where they are on these two continuums you're talking about. And the point of it that's very interesting.

interesting is if all your goals cluster kind of together on one side of the wheel, well, you're going to have less value-to-value conflict because they're kind of in alignment with each other. But when you have values that are across from each other are in different parts of this polarity, you're going to have more values-to-values conflict. And when it comes to doing the things that we want to do, I think we face two challenges. The one that most of us think about is simply the value versus desire. I refer to it as what do I want now versus what do I want most, right? Value being most.

So we have desire to value conflicts, but we also get value to value conflicts. So for example, where would family fit in this list of goals? Oh, so value. Or values. Yeah. So family would be almost a priority. And so it could fit in in any one of them. of these really. You know, you could want power over your family, I suppose. Interesting. But you could also

want to achieve incredible things with your family, climbing Everest, or it could be security, right? Family could be a great sense of security for you. It could be benevolence, right? Family could be a vehicle for kindness for you. It could be hedonism, which is under pleasure, the pleasure value with your spouse, right? It could be any one of these 12. And that's the beautiful thing is we have all these different priorities in our life that can be expressed any single way. Health is an interesting one, right? Yeah. That was a question that I had of the research is where does health fall?

Isn't that a fundamental thing? Because all of these values have an evolutionary basis too. But health could be expressed any one of these ways. We could want a body that we're proud of achieving. So it fits with the value of achievement. We could want the pleasure value, right? we could want to feel good in our body. It could fit with the security value.

We want to be able to play with our grandkids one day or today. That's the beautiful thing about the values is the different goals and priorities that we have can usually be expressed through any single one of these values. And so this is the thing about our goals. First of all, goals are, I think we get wrong about our goals. Goals, to me, are really a prediction. They're a prediction of where we believe our current and our planned actions will take us. That's all a goal is.

And so then we become a subject in our own story and we get to see, okay, what is actually leading to more progress? The progress that I'm predicting. You know, there's this kind of vicious cycle we fall into where the goal, which is really prediction, turns into an expectation, which because we're so bad at predicting the future, turns into disappointment, then we set more goals. This is a cycle that we need to break out of. But there's usually a way to edit the goals that we have so that they're more in line with the values that we have.

So one example, slightly after New Year's, a lot of people are having resolutions, maybe to lose a bit of body fat this year. If you have a goal to say, have a six-pack abs by beach season, right? That fits with the value of face, which is how we come across to other people. But again, health can be expressed through

a lot of different priorities. So it might be expressed, maybe face is your lowest value, but self-direction and pleasure are your highest. At least they are for me. A better goal for you might be to say, okay, screw the six-pack. What I really want, what I'm going to edit my goal to be is to experiment with three different ways of eating, experimentation, being self-direction, to find the one that is most satisfying and sustainable, right? Satisfying being the pleasure value. So it's usually possible to edit the goals that we have so they're more in line with this motivational nature, which is our values. This is slightly different than how I have traditionally looked at it, which is always good. I love getting the apple cart shaking up a little bit.

Because I'm thinking about what I have is like through the work I've done, sort of my list of values. And I don't think they line up here exactly, right? So mine are, interestingly, health is one. Yeah, yeah. I've got kindness, I've got curiosity, I've got contentment, and I've got adventure. Oh, they do line up. They do line up.

I think those are different names for a lot of things. So health would be something that can be expressed through multiple values. Kindness is benevolence. Benevolence, yep, that one. And curiosity would fall under self-direction. Okay. So it's like a broader, these are kind of broader umbrella, I guess, terms for these. Contentment, I would put under security, depending on how it's expressed.

And adventure would be stimulation. Stimulation. Right. And so for a great example of two values that lie at different sides of the thing, you have stimulation and security as a value. Again, I don't love the word security. I understand what it's saying. Contentment to me is an appreciation for what I have. It's the ability to be present.

It's because I'm not really in general, I take a lot of risks. So I don't seem to be very security oriented. And contentment is almost one of those that I have to like, I feel like I want, I have to work at a little bit. Anyway, so, but stimulation or adventure and contentment as an example where you and I are using slightly different terminology to talk about. about the same thing, which is those are often at loggerheads with each other because contentment says you should be happy right where you are with exactly the way things are. And stimulation or

adventure is like, hey, I want different things. Come on. Give me something new. Let's get out. Right. That's an example of a values to values clash that finds its way into my life on a very regular basis. Yeah. Oh, 100%. And you see that a lot of the disagree. And I'm not going to get into cultural stuff obviously, but a lot of the disagreements we have more broadly are a clash between different values. I look at the clash between self-direction and tradition, right? That's so often clashes with one another. And so we have, and this has been the wild thing. And I should say full credit, where credit is due with this research. This values model is courtesy of Shalom Schwartz. It's been validated across hundreds of thousands of participants, more than across culturally,

more than 60 countries, which is beautiful to me how there's this universal nature that we have. But it shows, and the beautiful thing about this model to me is when I have a disagreement with somebody, lately I've been starting to look through that disagreement to the values that might be at play. Because there usually are some clashing motivations within these things that we have with other people. But then it gets a bit awkward when it's with ourselves. Right? Exactly. And so the easiest way to tell if something's a priority to us is if we've done it already, right? So so often the goals that we have, there's some fundamental part of them that is misaligned with this motivational nature that we have. This I find absolutely fast because then you can divide those into two categories, right? We have the goals that aren't a good fit. Maybe they're sepia tone. Maybe they're just something that we don't truly want. You know, like you were saying, saying there may be an expectation somebody else has of us, we should drop those goals in my view because then it's more of an opportunity to try more goals on for size because there's an

opportunity cost with goals, right? Everything we pursue is at the expense of everything that we could be pursuing. But then you have the goals that like lower your cholesterol or something where you don't want to do it. You don't want the process of doing it, but you want the tangible outcome that the process will produce. And then aversion comes into play. You know, aversion being anything that makes a task or a project or a commitment ugly to us, right? Aversion, not a version of, but aversion is wrong word, not wanting. Ugliness. And in some cases, fuggliness for our goals. So every goal has embedded within it a different amount of two things, desire and aversion. So desire compels us to doing the goal

and can include things like social contagion, you know, the habits we catch from other people. And then aversion is the other ingredient which repels us from wanting to do the goal. Usually the things on our list, the desire is far crowded out by the aversion that we have to doing the thing. And so aversion comes from very predictable places, though. So it comes from when something is boring, frustrating, unpleasant, when it's far away in the future, when it's unstructured, and when it's meaningless. And so it's not aligned with that motivational nature. So this is the interesting thing about goals. Some of them are fundamentally misaligned with our values.

Others of them have the values clash, which leads to that aversion. But goal editing can get us further, you know, editing the goals so that they actually accommodate whatever our top values. values are, as well as taming the aversion, which can come after that. There's so much in there, so many different places we could go. I want to start by asking you a question to get your thoughts on it, because you do reference it as one way in the book of figuring out values is to look at how you're spending your time. And that then tells you a little bit about your values. And I find that both true and reductive.

By true, I mean, yes, on one sense where you spend your time does show what values are operating in your life at that time. But I would argue that so much of our behavior ends up being driven by either autopilot behavior, strong cultural stimulus. in the case of those of us who have mental health issues, our mental health will drive those. The easiest example is me as a heroin addict, right? On one hand, yes, I valued heroin over anything else. I would tear the rest of the world down to get that thing. So that does show on one level what value is operating.

I don't think that that is who I am. And so that was a case of I didn't have the skills, the tools, or the ability to live towards. the values I wanted. Now, I can look at your values list and see what I was trying to get out of doing drugs. I can see, like, what that was an attempt to do value-wise. And so that's the thing I think often about when I think about that, like, look at what you do and it'll tell you what you value, is that sometimes that's true, but I also think it puts a real limit on ourselves and causes us to think, am I just the kind of person who wants to shoot heroin all the time? I mean, that's an

extreme example, right? But pick whatever your thing is. It's such a good point. where where we spend our time can give us a starting point, but it's no substitute whatsoever for a scientifically validated values testing instrument. That's the beautiful thing about this being rooted in science is there's actual scientific instruments for measuring the values that we have that will cut through our mood on a given day. You know, security actually is a value that's going up right now. You know, you look at the changing nature of the world.

And so there are these fundamental shifts, but then there are the days where we feel less of a sense of security. And so you really want to break through the addictions, the temporary states that we pass through as well to get to that fundamental motivational course. So you're exactly right. By the way, I did partner with a company who created the best values testing instrument in the world for this book to give it at a lower price. but you know I write in the book that I think something like that should be free right right because we should all have the tools it unfortunately has to cost money because of licensing stuff and paying to that you know stuff like that but I think something like that should be free because the best tools that we have to go off of is okay how do you spend your time already or looking through these 12 values which of them feel like they motivate you the most you know these are very well I suppose time tracking is more an objective measure, but it's imprecise. It's not as precise as that values testing instrument. This is the interesting thing about values is what leads us to develop certain values. And I feel like we're in a safe place to nerd out a little bit about where the values come from.

I think we are. Yeah. Unfortunately, this could take us down an extraordinarily deep rabbit hole. So I'm going to only let it go so far, but let's start. Yes. Okay. So, okay, I will do it like in a nutshell kind of thing because I do have a eye on the clock too. We have two different types of intentions that we have in our life. There's the deliberate intentions which lead us to setting more thoughtful intentions, right? We reflect and we choose where to go. Then there's the default intentions, which is just the habits, whether they're habits of behavior or thought that make up so much of our life. And values are constructed, when you look at different disparate parts of the research, out of the intentions that we

have mostly the default intentions, but also that layer of deliberate intentions, which is motivated by the fundamental motivations of the default intentions that we have. I feel I feel I've gotten two in the weeds. You had a good... No, no. No, no, no, no you haven't. You had a good read of it, but it's fascinating to me where these default intentions that we have, the habits, the things that we don't want to do, the things that we love that we do. This forms the foundation of our values and then we put the deliberate layer on top of it, which is what we gravitate to doing naturally. The part that's challenging about all this is trying to recognize where even these intentions and values come from. You list social environments, cultural and family conditioning, desire to find happiness, avoid pain, lessons we've learned.

I mean, they come from all over the place. This is the rabbit hole for me. is trying to sort out, like, what of that is quote unquote mine versus which ones are borrowed? And how do you ever tell that? Because we are conditioned creatures to the nth degree. There is no me out there that has its own values outside of the context in which he finds himself. It's an imprecise science. I can never really be like, these are mine. I can only do my best. to be as deliberate and thoughtful as I'm able to be about which ones seem to matter. Yeah, and I love that you read off that list because one of the interesting groups of people

that I had a chance to chat with in writing this book is I was learning a lot about intentionality from the research, from the scientists, from interviews, all that stuff. There were a lot of gaps in the research, frankly, that I wanted to fill. And so I turned to maybe not an unsuspecting, acting, but a group that is full of wisdom about the nature of intentionality, which is Buddhist monks. You know, Buddhist monks observe the causes and effects within their minds, right? So they're coming at intentionality from almost the inside out where science is almost coming at intentionality from the outside in. But who contemplates intentionality more deeply than Buddhist monks? And so I was really struggling.

with what you're listing out there, with where does intention come from? Because you ask that question of the research and, A, it's difficult to find a direct answer, but B, you find that it comes from a lot of different places, everything from our biology to the social environments that we're a part of, right? Culture, family, all the conditioning that happens in that context.

So we have a lot of default intentions that we accumulate from our biology, from our conditioning, from the conditioning that we do to ourselves and the habits that we've integrated, the lessons that we've learned. But one big insight from Adjohn Viradamo is the name of the monk. He declined to be interviewed for the book,

but he has talks out there, so I feel comfortable mentioning his name in the podcast here. And one frankly beautiful, beautiful, beautiful source of intentionality that he put out there that is not talked about in the research. He called our self-reflective capacity, which is our ability to look within ourselves

and ask questions of our inner world to be able to determine what we would like to do differently and where we truly wish to go. And so we have this almost a gradient between how deliberate an intention is. Right, on one hand, we have those hardwired, biological impulses that are the purest of default intentions, right? You have to go to the bathroom on a road trip. By God, you're going to set an intention to, you know, make the next

pit stop, if not pull over on the side of the road, whatever it might be. But then you have the most deliberate intentions on the other side where you're still. And then your mind decides, you decide what you wish to be doing differently, right? And it can be something very simple, right? You could be listening to a playlist and then hit pause. And so instead of just hearing the next song that's offered to you, you hit pause, you wait for a song to occur to you in intention, and then you hit play on that song. Our to-do list as well, I think this can be extended to that where, you know,

to-do lists are amazing. I write about productivity. I'm a big fan of to-do lists, especially how they allow us to externalize the things that are on our mind. but often the best thing we can do is hitting that equivalent of the pause button and not looking at our to-do list and really reflect what is the next best thing that I should be doing after I finish with this current thing. It's that simple nature of tapping into our self-reflective capacity that can not only be beautiful but also bring forth these intentions that

you know, we'll probably enjoy that song more than the playlist that we were listening to. That tasks that we intuitively decide what to do instead of logic, it might be more meaningful. It might be more productive than whatever was going to happen instead, just going down the list. And so there's this intuitive capacity when it comes to intentionality that's connected with this almost ancient wisdom, but it isn't really. It's just the wisdom of the causes, effects, and conditions of our mind. As a both-and kind of guy, I think this is really interesting because I find sometimes letting the playlist serve it up to me is the right choice and other times being intentional is the right

choice. I'll give an example. So much of this is context and situation dependent. So for example, I've talked many times about I have a tendency towards a low mood. And when I get in that state, very often, part of it is that nothing sounds good to me. but I know music is healing. So I have a playlist that in those moments, I go hit shuffle and I have got something coming to me that I couldn't sort out in the moment because my mind just isn't working right.

Now, interestingly, there's a big element of intentionality in this because I thought about it ahead of time. Yeah. Same thing with the task list. There are times that I am very locked into like what's important, what I'm doing. I can pause, I can reflect, I can think. There are other times that if I'm just struggling or my mind is scattered, like, I just need like, okay, lay it out for me, do this, do this, do this. And I find so many of these things end up being a result of context.

And a lot of context ends up being where we are at the moment. Yeah. So accounting for how much energy you have. You know, I think of packing too. This is going to show how big of a nerd I am. But there's an ethical keyboard maestro on the Mac where, you know, it's a scripting app so you can have it type in certain keystrokes. So I created the ultimate packing list where I would press caps lock P at the caps lock being coded to a short code on my keyboard.

And it would pop open a window say, how many days are you gone? Is this a domestic or an international trip? Are you going for work or for business? And I would select the different things. And keyboard maestro, incredible app, if you're a big nerd, would automatically create a new file on my computer. and pre-populate it with all the numbers of the various things that I would need to pack. Wow. So five pairs of underwear if I was gone four days because I had a plus one for the extra

travel delays or whatever on the other end. Would I bring a camera, you know, a nice camera if I'm going for a work trip or all this stuff? But what I found was that when it came time to pack, I wouldn't enjoy packing. I would feel like a robot just going through the motions of it. But then there were the times when I had no energy and it's like, okay, it's been a long day. I just got back from a trip. Just tell me what I need. Tell me what I need. And so this is another way of cultivating intention where we do have these two layers of intention in our life. We have the

default intentions and the deliberate intentions. But so much of intention is not just choosing what we're going to do, which leads us to actually enjoy it more, right? I found that it was more enjoyable to pack when I was, when I used the pack list as more of a confirmation than anything. You know, so we don't just enjoy it more, but we have to craft the defaults in our life to some extent. Right? And it's not just about forming new habits or leaving big ones behind. It's about or bad ones behind. It's about having this kind of default nature of our mind, of our body, of our life that we can just rest back on when we have less energy. And you can tell I'm very interested in intentionality. The research behind this is very fascinating. You wrote an entire book on

Yeah, yeah. But we have these moments where we shift between this intentional and intentionless mode constantly, right? Like if you wake up and maybe your family's out and you're in bed, maybe you would find yourself going through the motions of your day. Maybe you'd grab your phone, you'd scroll around a little bit, maybe you'd put on a song or whatever your morning might look like. But then you have a little mini moment of awakening, right? Where you think, okay, it's time to get up, what am I actually going to do now? And we have these moments where we shift between these two states of running on autopilot versus acting more deliberately. And that in itself should be something that we have a greater amount of intention over. So we should not only appreciate

our defaults, but we should love the things that we intend to do too. So, and this is the interesting thing about intention is it's a very complex faculty of the mind, but that once we are able to deconstruct it, harness it, understand it, you know, everything from our values to the daily intentions all the way down through our goals and priorities and plans, the payoff can be incredible in terms of how much more we enjoy things, how much more meaning we have, and that extra productivity too. It's quite wonderful. Yeah, you know, having something like your book is doing sort of walk through the process is very helpful because it is really sloppy inside or our minds, at least is in my mind. And there's a whole lot of, yeah, except then, but what if this? And

right, I mean, writing my book, I had to be like, I want to caveat everything. I want to be like, well, except when this, but in case you're this kind of person, then that, and unless this has happened, then that. And I was like, well, at a certain point, the whole book would just simply be, it's complicated, I'm done. That's not exactly helpful. It's true. It's probably the truest view I know, but it's not exactly helpful. And I think the same thing can happen with all of this stuff. It's complicated. And having a process to follow and making some deliberate attempt to do your best is better than not doing anything. Yeah. There's a lot of complex science, but it is possible to create a structure around the intentions that we do set. Right. One of my favorite ways of doing this

is to have what I call in the book, Islands of Intention. So little periods of the day, of the week of our life, where we take a step back and think, okay, where do I really wish to go here? An intention is just a plan that we're going to do something. And so the more little periods that we have to plan, the more intentional we become, the more we optimize for the various currencies of our life

that we're interested in. or that's productivity, meaning, accomplishment, any one of these values, those are the ultimate currencies in our life as our values. And so having rituals that we're able to connect with in this pursuit is so, one of my favorite intention rituals, just to give people something tangible here, is the rule of three for setting intentions. And I've mentioned this rule so much over the last decade of writing about productivity that I should like have a nickel every time I mentioned I would be a very wealthy man right now, Eric. But all it is is at the start of the day,

you fast forward to the end of the day in your head. And you ask, okay, what three things will I want to have accomplished by the day's end? And you can do this with your work. People like doing it with work more than personal life. But with your personal life, you can really decide how balanced you wish to be between these different contexts of your life. You can choose how much you bite off of your goals every single day.

every week as well, right? You can do the same ritual at the start of the week. You look to the week ahead and think, okay, what are the three big intentions that I want to accomplish this week? The week is done, what do I want to look back on and feel good about accomplishing? And again, you know, it's important to hold these things a bit loosely, right? Because intentions in this way, any goal is really just a prediction of where you believe you will be at the end of the week. at the end of the day, reality will, you know, collide with these idealized versions and then you'll find yourself in a different place. So see it as a prediction. Don't hold it too tightly.

But see yourself as kind of a subject in this pursuit of greater intentionality where, you know, you make a prediction, you try to follow through, then you observe. Okay, was that sepia toned? Was that too aversive? Do I need to beat back aversion somehow? Do we need to cultivate desire somehow here? Do I need to connect it with what motivates me? So I love doing the rule of three every single day, every single week, as well as every year. I have three yearly intentions, too, in addition to my list of goals. So that's the wonderful thing is once you start with the science behind intention, you can kind of work backwards to the tactics for what you can do to integrate that science into your life.

So what were the three last year and where the three this year? Oh, yes. Let me pull up my goal list. Let's see, current goals. So with work or personal? Oh, you do it by domain? Yeah. Give me one from each.

That'll be fine. That'll be sufficient. Okay. So for my work goals under the value of security, because I have all the goals nested under the values. So I can remind myself of the motivational nature behind them. Operate a sustainable business is the outcome. So in other words, the process for the,

that outcome was continue to keep one year financial runway and to revisit it. Simple, I don't spend a lot of money. I'm a simple little author. And so that's my goal. For personal, a health intention for this year, build a resilient, strong, and peaceful mind. That's a big one for me this year. And the process is to invest in meditation streaks. Okay.

Yeah. So simple, right? Yeah, but these are the big things that we're after. I love the idea of these implementation islands also. Going back a paragraph or two. Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of small steps, right, little by little. And we often approach this stuff as if it is a big thing to do, right? We've got to go away on a weekend retreat to get it all sorted out.

And sure, that can be great. And for many of us, we're not going to make that an option. So this ability, I think what's more important than spending a ton of time on all this stuff at one chunk is to do exactly what you're saying, which is just to reflect a whole lot more often. Who do I want to be in this situation? Or what do I want to do? I mean, those are sort of two questions that I orient a lot of the book around. What do I want to do? Who do I want to be?

But the more often we ask that, the better off we are. Because the answers also are always changing. We are changing. Our lives are changing. It's all shifting. And so to think that I'm going to sit down and map out my goals and then I'm going to know what to do all the time moving forward. It's sort of like back in my project management days, I remember this. There were certain people who would want to create the ultimate Gant chart, right?

And they would have done their Gant chart to link this Gant chart. and to link with this other game. I mean, there's the calm plan. I just always would be like, this is just a terrible idea. Because we're going to create this thing. We're going to spend a ton of time even getting it to work in the first place,

which is questionable. And then it's going to fall apart two weeks in. We're not going to go according to plan. And then you addressed this earlier. We're going to then just be like, well, I don't. And I throw the whole thing away, and we're kind of done. instead of like, okay, yes, planning is good, but what's equally as important is continuing to

replan. And I love this three thing list because it's an easy way to do that. It's a little by little thing. If we ask ourselves those questions regularly, we're going to be more aligned between our values, our priorities, our goals, and our tasks. There's no perfect alignment, but there's more alignment. Yeah. you know, this is the classic productivity trap, right? You can spend all day reading about productivity

and this kind of stuff. But for every minute you spend reading about productivity, how many minutes do you actually get back? Yeah. Right? Because if you're losing, if you make back, you know, 45 seconds for every minute you spend reading about product, that first of all, it's probably not a good book or not a good video or not a good podcast, whatever it is that you're consuming, but that's taking up precious time that you could be acting towards the goals that you have. And we need action, right? We need the feedback that comes with action in order to inform the intentions that we're going to set next. So, and this is, I think, what a lot of us get wrong. We don't see ourselves as a subject in our goals. We see ourselves as somebody who we need to

set up to perform in the goals that we have. And we're either a failure. or a success. And it's a, of course we're going to fail, right? Because we don't edit the goal. We put too much pressure on ourselves. We don't get the feedback to edit the goal over time. So, you know, I'm a big fan of actually listing out the goals that we have and just reviewing them regularly to think, is this still serving me? Is this still worthwhile? Was it sepia tone? Does it need an edit? Do I need to reframe it around a different value? Is there too much aversion in this goal? So I need to tame that aversion. Do I need to cultivate desire in some way? Do I need to carve out a different situation in my environment so I'm not distracted or I'm surrounded by different people? But it all

goes back to this ratio between planning and action where I think in general, you know, we tend to act too much and plan too little. You know, most people, you know, they maybe spend 95% acting and 5% planning. That's not enough planning. because we have a lot of different layers across which we need to become more intentional. But then there's the productivity trap that you mentioned too, where we spend all day planning, all day organizing, we're shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, and then we crash into whatever the metaphorical iceberg is in that situation. So this ratio between planning and action, but we also need that component to connect the two

so that planning leads to action, which leads to planning. Yes. And so we have this self-reflective ritual embedded within that, which, you know, write about in the book, there's a lot of different ones that we can do from, you know, everything from tracking our time to reflecting on these intentions, to looking at the goal list that we have. But we need to tap into that self-reflective capacity that we have too, because that's ultimately where our deepest goals come from. I think this goes back to something you said earlier, which is that goals are a prediction.

Yeah. And I think how we define goals is really important and a real tricky thing. You talk about two kinds of goals. It's talked about the two kinds of goals and which is better or do we need both or what do we do? Yeah. So let me pull up my goal list again because it kind of gets to something that I was kind of talking around. There's kind of a debate in productivity nerd circles between process goals versus outcome goals. And so, process goal is just what you're going to do to make the goal of reality. And the outcome goal is the broader story of change that you want to make. So, you know, if to give a very simplistic example, an outcome you want to achieve might be to be wealthy in retirement, right? That might be the outcome. The process might be to save 20% of your gross income or whatever it might look like. And so both are essential, though, right? Because they live in different layers of this productivity stack. Because the process goal is more of a plan, really.

So it exists a bit further down that intention stack. It takes place over a shorter distance of time. It's essentially what you are currently experimenting with for creating the outcome that you're seeking. And so this is, I think, you know, holding goals a bit more loosely, but seeing the process that we're investing into those goals as an experimentation. because this is another way we disappoint ourselves in the pursuit of our goals is we don't just not achieve the outcomes that are really just a prediction, but we only try one, two things. We see ourselves as a failure when they're not producing the outcome, but maybe we just haven't experimented with enough things yet in order to produce the outcome that we're seeking. We might need to go through a bunch of different processes to create the outcomes that we're really after. And it goes to the different stages of goal attainment as well.

So we have the learning stage. We're really just learning what we need to do in order to make a goal of reality. And then we have the performance stage where it's like, okay, I know what I need to do now. Now it's just, I just need to put in the reps. Now I just need to perform because I have all the requisite knowledge. We so often tend to jump right into that performance phase. Yes. and skip the learning stage and skip past all the experimentation that we really should be doing,

which maximizes those odds of goal attainment over time. So a lot of different little tweaks that we should be doing not only to the goals themselves, but also to the mindsets that we have around them. An example that comes to mind for me is writing my book. Because in the beginning, I couldn't set some goal like words per day, pages, per day. I had no, I don't know what I'm doing. I still don't know what I'm doing, but, but I really, really didn't know what I was doing. So all I set were effort goals, right? I can measure this. Am I putting the time in? Now, there was an outcome goal that wrapped the whole thing,

which was I got to deliver a book back to a publisher on X date via the contract. So there's a big outcome. But to your point, I didn't know enough early on to start saying something like, okay, here's what it's going to be. I knew I had 12 months and I had 11 chapters. I was like, okay, it's roughly a chapter a month. But even that, I was like, if I pin myself into that, I'm going to start to get really stressed really early. Now, over time, I began to get a rhythm and be like, okay, I do think I can turn around the next draft of X chapter in a week seems reasonable because I knew what I was doing. But I think this is so important is that ability, as you say, to learn and give ourselves time to figure out how to even do this thing.

And the process of learning, the research shows, it's the same as having a growth mindset, right, where any feedback you get that happens to be negative in pursuit of a goal, so you hit an obstacle, a milestone or something, you're in the learning phase, so the learning process actually absorbs that frustration, where if you're in the performance phase and you hit a roadblock of milestone,

So you see it as a personal failure. Yep. And so you might actually do the same actions, right, in both of those cases. But what changes is your relationship with the goal, which has a huge impact on the long-term sustainability of a goal. And it goes back to the goal editing around values that we were chatting about, where if you have a goal to have that six-pack apps by beach season, which connects with face that you're not motivated in the slightest to achieve, but you edit it to be about self-terreaching. and pleasure, right? Eat whatever the example was that I used. Eat cleanly, experiment with a few different ways of eating cleanly, whatever it might

look like. The actions that you might take under each goal might be the exact same. But what changes is your relationship with the goal, it becomes more exciting, right? You get more involved with it. You see it as something that you can mold that you are an active participant in shaping and not something that some past version of you burdened your current day self with. It's some change you're actively working to create that's tangible in your life. That's also meaningful to you.

This is how goal attainment should feel, right? When we're attaining our goals, we should feel like we're an active participant in our own life. But so often it feels the exact opposite where it feels like we're saddled with some responsibility some expectation that we have from our previous version of ourselves. So goal attainment should feel good because we're making these positive changes to our life. And so it's exciting to encounter these ideas that we'll get people to that place. Well, I think that is a beautiful and hopeful place to wrap up. Goals should feel good.

Yeah. Not all the time, but most of the time should feel good. Sometimes you just have to lower cholesterol. Sometimes you do. sometimes you do. Yeah. Thank you so much. I always enjoy seeing you. I always enjoy talking to you. The book is great. It's called Intentional, how to finish what you start. And in the show notes, we'll have links to it and you. Hey, thank you, buddy. Always good to be here and chat with you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking,

I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the life-lo. of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.