3 ways to be intentionally intentional

When I was in graduate school, I got the wild idea that I wanted to put my studies on hold and head north to Alaska to become a bush pilot. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this captivating job, bush pilots fly small planes delivering supplies, food, fuel, and people to remote areas that don’t have access to roads or railways. I never planned on making a career out of it, but I was 22 and in search of an exciting flying job before I’d enter the “real job” market. Even though I was young, I understood what lit me up.

Long story short, finding an open position for this job and getting hired ended up being excessively difficult. It involved cold-contacting hundreds of businesses I found in the Yellow Pages, buying a one-way ticket to Alaska to go door to door in person, and hitchhiking around the state in search of work. I took hundreds of actions, both small and large, before I was finally hired and given my first chance to fly.

After that flight, I ended up flying almost every single day for the rest of that summer. Being a bush pilot was exactly the adventure I was seeking. Every morning, I woke up excited to see where the day would take me, and every night, I fell asleep almost instantly, feeling satisfied with what I’d experienced. That summer, I was, without a doubt, living my most inspired life.
This experience did not fall in my lap. I worked my ass off to get it. Thinking back to all of the actions I took, I realize it might sound a bit obsessive—or even crazy. But it worked. I was bound and determined to become a bush pilot that summer, so I became radically intentional about following my true north.

This is what it often takes to craft your most inspired life. Sometimes you get lucky and opportunities pop up without any effort, but you can’t count on that. Instead, driving real change in your life takes a tremendous amount of intentionality. What got you here will not get you there. You will need to take different actions, and it might feel foreign, uncomfortable, and even scary. But if you keep your vision for an inspired life front and center in your mind, it will help provide the energy and courage you need for making progress.

As you think about following your true north and the outcomes that you want to achieve, here are three tips for boosting your intentionality:

1. Tiny steps forward add up.
When you’re navigating from one place to another, every step forward gets you closer to your destination. Sometimes it might feel like the little things don’t matter, but that isn’t true. It’s often the case that one small action will have a vastly oversized impact. Unfortunately, you can’t see into the future to know which actions will end up altering your trajectory! With that in mind, you can consider action as a volume game. Every person you network with, every article you read, and every time you practice honing your skills has the power to change your future. The more actions you take, the better positioned you will be to reach your goals. Improving just a tiny bit every single day is enough to create a long-term transformation. Keep plugging away and you will get to where you want to be. The key is to be conscious of your daily actions and ask yourself “are the actions I’m taking today getting me closer to my goal or not?” As long as you have far more yeses than nos, then you’re likely in good shape.

2. Form good habits.
Knowing that you will be taking hundreds—if not thousands—of actions over your lifetime to craft your most inspired life, you cannot underestimate the importance of developing good habits. This can be the difference in achieving your goal or never quite getting there. I highly recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book presents numerous strategies for making small, consistent action a part of your everyday life. As James describes, the key to forming a new habit is to “make the action obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.” James has a lot of good frameworks and tips for bringing this to life, and, at the core, his message is largely around the idea that actions matter. If you can make an action a habit, then taking action over time becomes a lot easier. If you can make a habit attractive or satisfying, then it becomes really easy to sustain progress over time. It’s actually a pretty simple concept, and it works, but it takes intentionality to do it.

3. Some actions are procrastination.
I went kiteboarding a while back in Mexico, and my buddy let me stay at his vacation house. He let me know that another guy was currently living there and that we would have no problems getting along. When I got to the house, we started chatting and I asked what brought him to Mexico. He told me that he came down from the U.S. to study cryptocurrency because his goal was to become a crypto guru. I told him that was a cool idea, and I asked what he was doing to become an expert. He told me he usually spends time listening to podcasts, reading, and trying to figure out next steps. I figured he was early on in his journey and had maybe been at it for a month or so. Instead, he told me he had been living there and working on this for a year. A whole year! And he hadn’t even traded a single bit of cryptocurrency; he was just “studying it.”

Sometimes it can feel like you’re making progress toward your goal, but you’re actually procrastinating by focusing on tasks that don’t intimidate you and drawing them out longer than necessary to delay getting to the harder parts of the process. This is not productive. No one wants to be busy if their actions aren’t really making a difference in getting the desired outcome, but so many people get stuck in that spot. It’s like an athlete who has never actually gotten on the field. You can only learn so much in practice. At some point, you have to get in the game if you want to keep learning and growing.

Don’t be afraid to become radically intentional about following your true north. This is almost always what it takes to drive the outcomes that you truly want. It’ll take hard work and determination, but it will be worth it.