Intention-based Living
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” You’ve probably been asked this question a million times and maybe even asked it yourself a few times. I think we should instead be asking “How do you plan on leading a fulfilling life?”
There’s a lot of different ways to live a fulfilling life. One path is having a strong sense of purpose and living in alignment with this purpose, whether that means having a career that helps you save the whales, following the rules of your faith, or putting as much effort as you can into nurturing your new puppy. But not everyone has a purpose and you don’t need one to lead a rich life. Another option is goal-based living in which you set specific time-bound goals that you consistently work towards achieving. This could be anything from learning a new language or climbing Everest. The point is that working towards anything consistently allows you to see progress and provides a form of purpose to each day. A third path is intention-based living. This means broadly deciding how you want to spend your time and then spending your time in that manner. This is a more touchy feely version of goal-based living. For example, you could set the intention of dedicating a month to prioritizing family time. This is less well defined than goal-based living where you may decide to spend at least ten hours a week with your parents for a month.
I started off leading a life defined by purpose before I switched to goal-based living. Today I lead an intention-driven life.
Growing up I believed my life’s calling was to save the world from its various ailments from global warming to poverty through a career in politics. This led me to pursue political science in college. Somewhere along the way I realized I didn’t want to dedicate my life to politics and wasn’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices. I am still passionate about having a positive impact on others, but I have a broader view about how I can achieve this.
My journey towards intentional living started in 2018 with setting a very specific goal to complete an Ironman triathlon. To be clear, I knew that doing triathlons was not my “purpose” — it was just something I wanted to pursue seriously for a period of time. When I committed to triathlons I knew I was deciding what the next couple years of my life would look like. It would involve feeling like I was consistently working towards my goal and seeing both improvement and setbacks. It would also mean making sacrifices, such as spending less time with family and friends and having limited time to travel. Since I knew these downsides up-front and still wanted to proceed they were easier to live with.
When I achieved my goal of completing an Ironman in 2020 for a brief period I was lost. I had to define my next chapter. At first, I was tempted to choose another ambitious goal. Everest sounded pretty cool, I thought. But I opted not to use this same goal-based living frame again. I reflected on my triathlon experience and realized that it was the work that I put in along the way that I most cherished; the Ironman was just the cherry on top. I decided to think about how I wanted to spend my time when defining my next chapter, which led me to intention-based living.
After having a super rigid schedule for a couple years, I had a strong yearning for family time, exploration and creative expression. I let these broad intentions of how I wanted to spend my time guide my decisions and goals. Most significantly, I moved back home. This allowed me to both spend time with my family and save money for travel. When I am home I am playing Scrabble with my parents and grandmas, hanging out with my dog, and seeing friends I grew up with. When I am away, I am exploring new countries, meeting people, and scaling mountains. This past year I learned to surf in Costa Rica, made a ton of new friends in Colombia, and went on cool hikes in Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina. I had never traveled at this pace in my life before. Setting the intention to explore was the driving force, which made me prioritize it. This change of pace in turn fueled my creative energy and led me to launch an improv story podcast and try stand-up comedy.
I like intention-based living the best. It’s the best of both worlds with respect to purpose-based living and goal-based living. Instead of defining your one life purpose, you reevaluate your purpose and define it every couple years through your intentions of how you want to spend your time. And instead of being tied to rigid goals you place more value on the journey, which will lead to you in the direction of achieving goals. That said, I am still highly goal driven but these goals are secondary to the broader intention I set.
However you choose to lead your life, it’s a win just to have the overarching goal of living a fulfilling life. Furthermore, I have observed that to make the enormity of the question “how do I live a fulfilling life” more manageable, it’s helpful to think about the next two years before contemplating the next twenty years with a focus on what you want to spend your time doing and with whom. Best of luck!
