What is your intention?

“No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

I don’t know from whom this quote originates, but it’s a maxim in military circles. Planning is wonderful and totally necessary but in practice plans never work out as planned. Things always go wrong. Inevitably.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath bring up the failure of planning early in their book, Made to Stick. Using the example of military planning, they point out that the core principle used to create focused, flexible action to accomplish mission objectives is not iron-clad planning. Instead, it’s clear intention. “Planning” they say, “…forces people to think through the right issues,” but it’s intent, the purpose of the planning, that is at the heart of the mission. If intention is clear, then plans can be altered or tossed out in service of getting the job done. Therefore, intent must be crystal clear, simple, and single. There can only be one top priority.

When considering your productivity, your goals, your purpose, what is your intention? What is it you intend to do? Is it build a successful business? Write a novel? Raise your child into a wonderful man or woman? Drilling down on your core intention is a vital part of achievement. Without clear intention, you may fritter away your time and wind up somewhere you didn’t want to go.

The Heath brothers say that military officers use two statements to keep their intentions uppermost in their minds:

• If we do nothing else today, we must ….
• The single most important thing we must do today is …

How would you complete those two statements?

Let’s say you intend to build a sustainable, profitable business that gives dynamite customer service. Then your two statements might sound like this: “If we do nothing else today, we must listen to every customer and respond to their requests and feedback as if the life of our business depends on it. The single most important thing we must do today is treat our customers like our most precious resource.”

What is your intention today? What is the single most important thing you can do today that will bring you closer to manifesting your intention? State it. Write it down. Make it happen.