In 2013, I received a General Manager Award covering the Middle East and Africa region. I was a sales leader in Dubai, five years into a career that had moved, inside the same company, from consulting to project management to sales. In 2015, I left anyway. I didn’t have another company waiting, or a plan with a fixed date attached. What I had was a direction: work on problems tied to real human outcomes, not sales targets. That direction took me through building CitizenUp, a civic-tech platform, and later a run of international fellowships, before it became Impactedia. None of those steps were guaranteed to work when I made them.
That gap, between holding a structure that works and choosing to leave it before the next one exists, is what living with intention actually looks like. It is not a mood. It is a decision made at a specific point, usually before the evidence is in.
Key Takeaways
- Living with intention is a decision made at a specific point, usually before the evidence is in, not a mood you wait to feel.
- Ambition can exist without intention: you can want more without having decided what “more” is for.
- Drifting can look extremely busy; the tell is not being able to say, in one sentence, what your last three decisions were actually for.
- Intention shows up in a calendar before it shows up in a mission statement, so a mismatch between the two exposes the real priority.
- An intention that stays a sentence on a page won’t survive a difficult week; it needs the smallest possible structure to hold it.
What living with intention means
Living with intention means choosing what you pursue based on what you have decided matters, not based on what is already working or what is expected next. It is the difference between drifting forward on momentum and stopping to ask whether the momentum is still pointed somewhere worth going.
This is not the same as having ambition. Ambition can exist without intention: you can want more without having decided what “more” is for. Intention is the decision that comes before the wanting gets organized into a goal.
Why the slogan version fails
“Live with intention” has become a caption under a sunrise photo. That version asks nothing of you. It suggests a feeling you should try to have, rather than a decision you need to make.
The real version is less comfortable. It means naming, in specific terms, what you are optimizing for, and then noticing when your actual choices contradict it. In my case, in that corporate role, I was optimizing for stability and external validation, and the role was delivering both. The intention I actually held, working on problems tied to real human outcomes, was somewhere else. Naming that gap was uncomfortable, because closing it meant giving up something that was already working.
Three signs you’re drifting instead of choosing
1. You can’t say what you’re optimizing for
If someone asked you right now what your last three decisions were actually for, and you can’t answer in one sentence each, you are likely drifting. Drifting isn’t lazy. It can look extremely busy.
2. Your calendar and your stated priorities don’t match
Intention shows up in a calendar before it shows up in a mission statement. If the thing you say matters most gets the leftover hours, the stated intention is not the real one.
3. You keep choosing the option with more proof behind it
The safer path always has more evidence supporting it, because it has already been tried. An intention worth acting on will sometimes point you toward the option with less proof, not because uncertainty is good, but because the proof-heavy option was often chosen by someone else’s definition of success, not yours.
How to start, without the sunrise photo
Pick one area of your life, work, health, relationships, and write down, in one sentence, what you are actually trying to achieve there. Not the socially acceptable answer. The real one. Then compare it to how you spent your time last week in that area. The gap you find is the actual starting point.
An intention that stays a sentence on a page will not survive a difficult week. Intention without a system stays a wish. Once you know what you are optimizing for, the next step is building the smallest possible structure that holds it: a fixed time, a specific action, a way to check whether it happened.
In the Method, this is Intention, the first of five elements, the direction the other four are meant to serve.
FAQ
Is living with intention the same as mindfulness?
No. Mindfulness is about attention to the present moment. Living with intention is about direction, what you are choosing and why. You can be fully present while still drifting toward a life you never actually chose.
What’s the difference between intention and a goal?
A goal is a target. An intention is the reason the target was chosen in the first place. Two people can share the same goal, launch a business, for entirely different intentions, and that difference will shape every decision they make along the way.
How long does it take to live more intentionally?
There is no fixed timeline, and treating it as a finish line misses the point. It is closer to a standing question you return to, at decision points, not a state you arrive at once and keep.
The gap between working and honest is where intention actually lives. Most people never look at it directly, because looking means admitting the current structure, however well it is working, might not be the right one.
