Intention

CHAPTER 30The Garden of Intention

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

—Rudyard Kipling

When we started writing this book, we were certain that:

• Intention is a big topic to cover in a single book.
• It has never been more important for us to be intentional—as individuals, family and community members, colleagues, and leaders.

When something is both urgent and impossibly vast, your only choice is to approach it with the 80/20 principle—to try to capture the essence of a solution that is simultaneously imperfect and impactful. This is how we chose what we say about the five ingredients of intention in this book: willpower, curiosity, integrity, attention, and habits. In our research, every high performer we read about and spoke with exemplifies these five ingredients (to different degrees). Equally important to us is the compelling evidence that each of these ingredients is highly trainable—each of them, with intention, can be improved.

We started this book by talking about a problem that defines our modern era: despite doing collectively better in terms of many objective health and wellness measures, many of us (and often the most fortunate among us) live in a state of languish. As disengagement soars, leaving us to search for or create meaning in our personal and professional lives, we have come to rely on less satisfying substitutes for the depth of connection and purpose we yearn for and deserve. In a way, because we lack the ...