Mindset - Intentionality

From the 9/11 attacks in 2001 until 2021, the United States was at war. 20 years of war. During these 20 years of non-stop combat, more SEALs died from suicide than from being killed by the enemy.

Thousands upon thousands of operations. Constant fighting and life-or-death threats. And yet – when all was said and done – suicide killed far more SEALs than combat.

For a long time, being “hard” was seen as the most important attribute one can have in the Special Operations and Intelligence community. Being hard means you can be calm and effective in any challenge. It means you can endure breathtaking amounts of pain, suffering, and brutality without complaining, quitting, or failing to accomplish the mission.

This relentless, obsessive focus in the Special Operations and Intelligence community of being “hard” has, unsurprisingly, created a community of extremely hard people.

But the sheer amount of people who’ve taken their own lives has revealed a critically important lesson:

Hardness is worthless without joy.

What good is it that you can run for 72 hours, conduct clandestine operations behind enemy lines, and perform flawlessly in the most dangerous and stressful situations life has to offer if you cannot bear to go on living even one more day?

This is why the goal is not to be hard – to be calm and effective in any situation. The goal is to be mentally tough – to be calm, effective, and happy in any situation.

Intentionality is defined as the practice of living a life that makes you profoundly happy. Intentionality is the most powerful tactic of living a life of deep and durable happiness.

Many people are raised in families or cultures or teams in which prioritizing your happiness is viewed as some sort of frivolous or unworthy pursuit. You might hear things like, “Being happy isn’t what matters. That’s selfish and hedonistic. You should just focus on doing the most good or serving others or accomplishing the goal.”

I disagree for two reasons:

1.     Being happy (joy) and serving others is not mutually exclusive. They usually go hand in hand.

There’s a reason each flight’s safety briefing begins with the flight attendants instructing you, in the case of emergency, to put your oxygen mask on first before you assist others. You cannot give what you don’t have. You can’t help your loved ones find joy and happiness if you don’t know how to find it yourself.

Think about how it feels when you see someone you love – your spouse, your child, your best friend – so happy at something that’s happening in their life. It makes you happy too! Emotions are contagious. Even though it might seem counterintuitive at first, being happy yourself is the most powerful way you can bring happiness to those you love and serve as well.

2.     Living life without taking care of your happiness is like visiting the Louvre and only looking at the bathroom or going to the Sistine Chapel and only staring at the floor. You are needlessly missing out on vast amounts of beauty, joy, and magic that you could be experiencing. The things that make humans happy – spending time with people we love, doing things we enjoy, fighting for the things we believe in – these things are not trivial. They are the essence of life. To live a life that neglects the value of these experiences and the happiness they bring us is to utterly miss out on what it means to be alive.

You master intentionality by taking two steps:

1.     Determine what makes you optimally happy in life (your happiness equation, and it’s different for everyone).

2.     Learn tactics you can use to stay on the path of doing what makes you truly, and deeply happy instead of getting dragged off-course by the ever-present human desire for immediate gratification.

Step 1. Determining your happiness equation

Deep, lasting happiness is rarely something you just stumble into.

Imagine you need to buy a new mattress. So you blindfold yourself and just start walking into random stores. You go into a car dealership, a Thai restaurant, a toy store, and a gas station. Then at the end of this, you’re surprised and disappointed you didn’t find a new mattress.

Of course, you didn’t. knowing what you want isn’t enough to get it.  You have to know how to find it.

It’s the same with happiness. Most of us know we’d like it, but we have no idea how to get there. So, we just sort of blindly stumble around and do things because:

-        It’s what other people are doing.

-        It’s what someone else wants us to do.

-        It’s what is familiar and comfortable to us.

-        It’s what we’ve always done.

With this approach, sometimes we happen upon happiness, sometimes we find unhappiness and a lot of the time we just feel pretty neutral.

-        What makes you feel peak happiness?

-        What do you love?

-        What can’t you stand?

-        What makes you feel most alive?

-        What kind of person you want to be?

-        What do you want your life to look like?

Having answers to these questions is like having the directions to the nearest mattress store pulled up on your GPS. You know exactly what you need to do to reach the destination you’ve been searching for.

If happiness is life’s treasure – which it just might be – your happiness equation will serve as your treasure map.

Step 2. Staying on Track

Once you know your happiness equation and what makes you happy, the challenge is that trying to get there is like being Taylor Swift and trying to walk from one side of Times Square to the other. Just as thousands of fans will mob her and scream for autographs and selfies, obstacles, distractions, excuses, setbacks, failures, and the desires for comfort and immediate gratification will constantly bombard you while on your path to happiness.

If you don’t have tools you can use to stay the course, you’ll keep getting derailed and won’t ever reach the treasure on your treasure map.

One of the first tools: Why, Not What.

A guy I know graduated from medical school. When in medical school, he frequently had nights when he would get home from class or the hospital and really just wanted to sit on the couch and watch TV instead of doing the several hours of studying, he had to do if he wanted to achieve top marks.

Early in medical school, he would often give in to this temptation. This happened because he was focusing on what his options were: watching Netflix or studying. Of those two options, watching Netflix is much easier and more fun, so he always usually ends up choosing to do that.

What fixed his problem is when he stopped focusing on what his options were and started focusing on why he wanted each of those options.

He wanted to watch Netflix because it was easy and relaxing.

He wanted to study because:

-        It was his lifelong dream to become a doctor.

-        He wanted to spend his career saving lives.

-        He wanted to get top scores so he could get placed into his desired specialty of neurosurgery.

-        He wanted to become the best physician he could.

-        He wanted to be a man he and his loved ones were proud of.

When he thought about his options this way, wanting to slack off instead of study seemed ludicrously short-sighted, unimportant, and weal. So, he shifted his brain into gear and hit the book.

Failures in intentionality – when we fail to do the things, we need to do to achieve profound, lasting happiness – often occur because we get too caught up in the what rather than the why. When you view things through the what-center paradigm – and only consider what your options are – you will always want to choose the option with the most immediate gratification. When you instead view things through a why-centric lens – and focus on the reasons why you want to do each option – it forces your brain to remember that what you want most is far more important than what you might want right now.

Nothing has led to more deep and lasting happiness than learning to master the skill of intentionality.