Last Updated on May 2, 2022 by Chin Yi Xuan

Wanna achieve something significant or important in life (but nothing is really moving forward)?

If that’s the case, start being explicit with your rules, intention, and goals:

  • If you want to live healthier, this means making it specific to yourself that 6pm everyday is workout time and honor it with discipline.

  • If you want to invest better, this means having a crystal-clear stock selection & management process that you religiously follow.

  • If you want to achieve breakthroughs in your career, this means formulating a detailed plan to consciously improve & add value to your stakeholders.

Being explicit with your intentions may not necessarily imply that you have to let the whole world know about your intention (although you can, if you want). For most people, being explicit can be as simple as writing your intent and/or rules down in a journal and review it everyday or week.

 

Why though – why should you make your rules/intention/goals explicit to yourself?

Because if you don’t (like what you most probably have *not* been doing), then when things go against your favor, the stress starts kicking in, and when the road forward starts getting bumpy – you’d very, very likely going to choose the easy way out (does the sentence “I’ll do it tomorrow” sounds familiar?).

 

Here’s the thing:

You can’t follow a discipline that you never formulated in the first place. The clearer the intention/rules, the stronger they’ll serve as brakes to your impulses and guides to your best behavior.

Simply put, making your intention explicit provides you with a reason – an additional layer of support when you ever consider taking the easy out by procrastinating or giving up. Remember, the best performers are rule-governed. 

What’s your biggest intention/goal that you have not made significant progress in 2020? How refined are your intention/plans/rules? Certainly think about this over the week. 

Till next week (and happy December)!

p.s. This week’s newsletter is the rational me nagging on the procrastinator me. But since we are nearing year-end, I feel that some of you may need this little push so hope this helps!