Yesterday, I talked about intent. Today, I’m going to riff on it some more because it’s that important. In fact, drilling down on intent–singular, rigorous, relentless intent–is the most important thing you can do to be successful.
Think about this for a moment: you create your own reality. That’s right. You are supreme commander of your universe. Whatever it is that you that you do, think, feel, say, and are–that’s your reality. You drag every experience, every waking moment through your perceptual filter. Your perception and interpretation of what goes on around you is, by and large, derived from your expectation and your past experience. Which is to say, that which you are looking for and alert for is what you’re seeing, most of the time. And most of the time, you are not even aware of your expectations.
Take, for example, an experiment that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book, Blink. In this experiment, participants were given a set of scrambled words. To the participant, the words seemed random but they weren’t. One set of words was skewed toward “nice” (words like patient, polite, kind) and the other set toward “not nice” (e.g., rude, aggressive, interrupt). The participants took the test and then were asked to walk down the hall to interact with another experimenter. The kicker was that the participants were faced with an obstacle between them and the person they were meant to see.
When the participant arrived, the experimenter was deep in conversation with someone else. The folks primed with nice words were nice. They waited politely until the conversation was over and didn’t interrupt. Mind you, these were New Yorkers: people not generally known for nicety. The folks primed with not nice words were not nice. They were rude, impatient, and disrespectful. The results were significant and so strong, the observers were at a loss. People primed with nice were so nice that they defied the experimenters’ expectations. So what does that mean for you?
If it’s that simple to program expectation and perception unconsciously, imagine what you can do intentionally?!?
Now is the time to ask yourself, what is that you want from your life? No really. Really, really, really want more than anything else? If you’re not getting it, then you need to program your expectations and form a conscious intent. If you want, more than anything else to get appreciation, let’s say, then you must program appreciation into everything you do, think, say, and are. You must put appreciation out to everyone you meet. You must appreciate every single moment of your life, even the yucky ones. If you are appreciation, you will experience appreciation all day, every day, without fail.
Yesterday, when I mentioned the military “intent over planning” strategy, I was referring to something that is called “commander’s intent.” You are the commander of your universe. Commander, what is your intent?
- If you do nothing else today, you must [what?]…
- The single most important thing you must do today is [what?]…
Write it down. Make it happen.
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[The priming experiment from Blink is: Bargh, et al 1996.Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71: 230-244.]
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