A Guide to Living with Intention

When I was in university I was studying electrical engineering and I hated it.

You could tell by the way I lived my life. Wake up, scroll on social media until I had to get out of bed. Skipping a lot of my classes so I could just stay home and binge watch TV and play video games. Getting high every night and bingeing on junk food. Go to sleep and repeat the process.

When I look back on my life — I realized that the main reason I lived this way was to numb the pain. Numb the pain of not living the life I want. Numb the pain of living up to my parent’s expectations.

Most people live a similar life to this. Wake up. Scroll through social media. Get ready. Commute to work. Work. Come home and numb the pain. Repeat.

A life of mediocrity.

A lot of times it’s much worse than mediocrity. Poor health. Poor relationships. Job that they hate. Financial stress.

The root cause of bad habits and addictions is to numb pain. The pain of negative emotions. It could be something as big as a traumatic experience. Or something that seems insignificant like the pain of working on a report.

Once I graduated I had the difficult conversation of telling my parents that I wanted to pursue business and marketing instead of engineering. They were crushed. Growing up in a south asian family, you had 4 career options:

1. Doctor

2. Lawyer

3. Engineer

4. Failure

This decision was the catalyst for my personal growth. I now had a purpose. One that was mine. I was finally working towards a life that I genuinely wanted. Not a life that society wanted me to live.

Slowly the negative habits started to disappear. I stopped smoking weed. I stopped drinking alcohol. I got rid of social media. I significantly decreased the time I spent watching TV.

This didn’t happen overnight. It took years for me to get here.

People didn’t like the fact that I stopped drinking. I was told that I was making a big mistake switching careers. I lost friends during this process. It was hard and got lonely at times.

We’re hardwired to fit in with the group. Hardwired for comfort and stability.

Typically people begin to change when something catastrophic happens that is out of their control. It could be getting laid off from your job or a break up. Rather than waiting for life to force change — it’s time we be proactive with creating the life that we want.

The Goal Funnel

The goal funnel is what I use to create a big vision for my life and be able to break it down into tiny actions that I can take today. Let me show you how to do this.

Write down a 3 year impossible goal. A goal that once you achieve it will make all areas of your life better. A 3 year impossible goal could be to make a million dollars in revenue in your business.

Now that we have an impossible goal that excites us, we want to keep breaking it down into tiny actionable steps that we can take today to make progress towards our impossible goal. It looks like this:

impossible 3 year goal → annual goal → quarterly goal → monthly goal → weekly goal → daily goal

When you break it down this way, your actions become more intentional. Everything leads towards your long term vision. Your impossible goal becomes a filter to what you say yes and no to.

Let’s continue this exercise and break down this 3 year into a one year goal. If our 3 year goal is to make a million dollars in revenue — our one year goal could be getting 10k followers on social media and building an audience.

Our quarterly goal could be to have a 1000 followers on social media.

Our monthly goal could be to complete a course on starting your own business and building and audience.

Your weekly goal could be to find a business models that suits your interests and purchase a course that can help fast track your progress.

Your daily action can be to spend 30mins researching different business models on youtube.

You see how we’re able to breakdown this absurd impossible goal into a tiny bite sized actions that you can start today? As you continue to complete you weekly and daily goals — you begin to build confidence that you can achieve your goals. You become more intentional with the actions that will get you there.

You might be wondering — I don’t know what goal I want to pursue? Or I don’t know what I want to do with my life?

The only way to figure it out is to pick a goal and take action towards it. Some point along the journey you might realize you chose the wrong goal. That’s okay. The only way to know is to actually go for it and see if you like it. If you don’t — pick another goal and take action.

If you’re worried about “failing” or being left behind in comparison to your friends — this quote will change your mind:

“Instead of picking one subject and sticking to it, the data shows that most top performers start their careers with a wide “sampling period.” This is a time of discovery, where they’re testing out all kinds of new activities, bouncing from this to that and back again, and often without much rhyme or reason.

Income-wise, while early specializers get out to an early lead, it doesn’t last. After about six years in the workforce, those who began their careers with wider sampling periods tend to catch those early specializers, then leave them in the dust.”

— Steven Kotler, The Art of Impossible

I hope this makes you realize how important and essential for you to experiment and pursue different goals to see what resonates with you.

Now it’s your turn. Block out 30-60 minutes to think of a goal and break it down into yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals.

Thank you for reading. Let me know if there’s anything here you found insightful.

— Ashvin