Intent, Time & Energy
The Trifecta to achieving what you want in life.
Preface
Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about meta-frameworks that allow you to live a happier, more fulfilled life. I’m by no means a philosopher or highly spiritual guru. This is simply a rational framework that I’ve developed for myself and iterated over time. Through conversations with friends, they’ve wanted to learn more about this so I thought that maybe you all would find this useful as well.
I’d say this is definitely one of my more esoteric pieces but excited to see how it’s received.
Absolute Truths
The way this framework is developed is from a few indisputable critical truths that we can build our reasoning from.
We’re all going to die. Pretty bleak yes, but there is no hiding from this truth.
A derivative from the first truth, your time is a limited quantity you can spend but not earn back.
You want to spend your time in a way that leaves no regrets by the time the clock runs out.
Given these absolute truths, there’s only three things that really matter:
Intent — what do you aim to achieve
Time — your life’s countdown timer
Energy — the quality of your time spent
I’ll explain each of these in more detail and why I think they’re so important and eventually how they all tie together.
Intent
The most critical part of this framework by far. I define intent as the high order reasoning for your actions. There’s a few stages of intenfulness that I can think of:
Having intents but not being conscious of them
Having intents, being conscious of them, but not acting on them
Having intents, being conscious of them, and actively acting on them
Many people fall in category 1. Being in this mode for too long is typically what causes quarter/mid-life crises where you wake up one day and why you do the things you do and question everything you’ve ever done.
The remaining majority is the category 2. This is when you have goals, dreams and desires that you have and are conscious of but never really act on. Leaving these unfulfilled can create a scenario where you have regrets about not doing the things you’ve always wanted to do.
Category 3 might just be a fancy way of saying living your life with purpose but ideally it’s when your intents are being fully actualised. When we’re in this state, we can viscerally feel it. Our intentions are known to ourselves and we are taking definitive steps everyday to act on them in a tangible way.
Time
Man’s greatest equalising force is Time. It doesn’t matter where you start or the disadvantages you have in a game, over enough time you can turn around most situations. The problem that many of us run into is that we feel like we don’t have enough time to do the things we want to do. I’ll actually argue that framing is wrong. What’s often happening is that we have subconscious intentions that aren’t able to actualise into reality because we’re not conscious of them.
For example, if you intend to actually become more fit and you make that conscious then you will remove things in your schedule to make the time to achieve that intention. A common push back might be that “my job takes up too much time and leaves me tired.” In that case you need to simply reframe your intention to “I intend to value my job more than my fitness goals.” Now if that doesn’t sound like your real intention you have a core problem on your current time allocation.
A lot of unrealised intentions come down to the fact because our time isn’t aligned with our intentions. A classic example is the CEO who wants to hire more people for his company. When asked about how many hours in a week the CEO spends on recruiting the answer is usually not a lot. Classic misalignment between time and intentions.
Energy
I’m still debating the name for this final piece but energy feels to be the best fit. Energy I define as your health and the quality you bring to the time. An easier way to think of it is a multiplier on time. This is great because if you’re high + positive energy then your time has a 10 fold pay off. However, if you’re low + negative energy then your time gets reduced to 0.
So what defines high + positive energy? Well it’s the classic culprits:
Good diet. Bad food impacts your energy levels in a very real way.
Good sleep. Bad sleep is as good as being drunk (quite literally).
Good exercise. No exercise creates a deficiency in endorphins that needs to be cultivated from artificial or harmful sources.
Once we have these three elements, our energy tends to be probabilistically as good as it can be. Not having these 3 is shooting yourself in the foot and creating negative EV on your time (which is limited).
Combining it All
Now, to bring it all together. When we’re:
Conscious of our intents that we wish to express in the world
Spending our limited time in the endeavours that advance our intents
Living in a high energy state to give positive multipliers on our time
We can fulfil our intents which ensure that the limited time we have is well spent so that we can meet death with harmony rather than anxiety.