Intention Is the Engine

Yesterday at 6:24 p.m., the Book of Life was sealed. This at least according to Jewish tradition (the liturgy famously imagines God inscribing our yearly fates on the first day of the new year, and locking in the decisions ten days later on Yom Kippur1), and according to the Apple weather app (my unquestioned authority on the time of local sunset). Hebrew year 5786 is officially underway.

Most of the time, I’m a Gregorian guy. In the standard rhythm of the (secular) year, I’m a believer in the value of annual reviews, and new year’s resolutions. I’m a believer in SMART goals and quarterly KPI reviews and all the rest. This got me thinking: What is the difference between this transition—from 5785 to 5786—and the upcoming turnover from 2025 to 2026? Both, after all, are times of reflection and goal-setting, both a pause before the turning of the page.

It felt clear to me—and seems clearer now, after writing—that there is a distinction between these two new years, the spiritual and the secular. That while superficially similar, the ancient practice of fasting, reflecting, and repenting is meaningfully different from the modern ritual of swearing that this, finally, will be the year we make it to the gym three times a week. What was this difference?

(Note that while the timing of this post is inspired by my own faith tradition, the general principle is universal. You could just as easily do an annual reflection on Thanksgiving, or December 15th, or whenever suits you best!)

After sitting with this question for a while, what I think is this: that it is wise and necessary to dwell in the underlying intention behind change before formulating more concrete goals. In this dwelling, you deliberately banish the thought of how success or failure will be scored; you stoke your intention, let it swell and blossom in terms that are pre-logical and perhaps even pre-verbal. This intention is the engine which provides the raw motivational force for change—directed loosely or not at all. Only later (i.e., when setting new year’s resolutions) is it necessary to find the steering wheel to direct your energies.

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I’ve already said I’m a fan of metrics. Let me now be more direct: I think far too many of us make the mistake of only intention-setting—making “goals” which are really just squishy expressions of duty or desire. These “goals” are sufficiently subjective and lacking in accountability that it’s easy to convince yourself you’ve succeeded regardless of the outcome, or to conveniently forget what you even set out to accomplish. As the old saying goes: You can’t manage what you can’t measure.2

But once you’ve mastered the art of specific, measurable goals, you’re at risk of overusing them. This is why I think it’s crucial to focus first, and with real deliberateness, on qualitative features of your purpose and a holistic vision of your goal state.

The first reason for this is that when you foreground metrics too early, you subtly corrupt the universe of ideas you’re even willing to entertain. You may unconsciously swap out a difficult question for an easier one, looking for your car keys where the light happens to be.

Of course many problems in life are difficult to measure. (How do you know whether you’re becoming a better parent or partner? How do you know if you’re getting happier over time?) But just because you’ll eventually need to adopt some imperfect proxy for the real thing doesn’t mean you should start with an imperfect proxy. Better to reach for bright, ambitious dreams and later deal with practicalities than to limit your imagination from the start.3

Second, even when your metrics are decent proxies for the real thing, you can fall prey to value capture. The metric becomes a target in and of itself, which leads you to forget why you chose to pursue it in the first place. Adam Mastroianni describes the phenomenon well in his post “How to drive a stake through your own good heart”:

If you break open a Goodhart4 situation, you’ll find two components inside: quantification (measuring something) and optimization (targeting that measure). Neither of these things is inherently bad, and neither is their combination. If you want to build more fuel-efficient cars, save enough for retirement, or pick the right AirBnB for a family reunion, you need to do some quantification and optimization.

The problem is that no measure is ever perfect, and the more you rely on a measure, the more you multiply its imperfections, and the more consequential they become.

…

Optimize Guys have a hard time figuring that out, because the engineering approach can fool you into thinking that you’re making progress when you’re really not. If you try to optimize, say, the number of dollars in your bank account, it will seem like you’re succeeding as long as that number is going up. Your investment portfolio can’t count the toll you’re taking on your relationships, and you might not realize that toll until it’s too late and your retirement party is full of people who are glad you’re leaving, and would prefer it if you were already dead.

Focusing on deep motivations and making them explicit isn’t a silver bullet against Goodharting. But it does at least make more salient what your metrics might be missing. For example, suppose your intention is to rekindle a deeper friendship with someone you’ve drifted apart from. You operationalize this intention with a monthly phone call—a bit of (healthy) quantification—and stick to it.

But has hitting this target actually made you closer with your friend? It could be that monthly phone calls are the wrong solution to the right problem. (The real answer could be something about the subject matter of the conversation, or making time for a less frequent but more substantive point of connection like an in-person visit.) In this way, the vivid, qualitative intention you set becomes the rubric against which the (quantitative) rubric itself is judged.

The two previous points are both about mistaking the map for the territory; my third and final claim is that there is often value in exploring the territory without any map whatsoever. By this, I mean developing intuitions about your psychospiritual landscape, and seeing whether it is even worth mapping onto more concrete goals. (Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”)

In the drifting friendship scenario, for example, it could be that your “desire” to reconnect is actually a byproduct of habit or obligation, and that really both parties would be happier letting the connection fade. Actively lingering on your underlying why here helps distinguish between true, deep motivations and other adjacent emotions, or mere fleeting fancies.5

Personally, my own Yom Kippur–inspired reflection tends to produce a different list than what I’ll compile at the end of the secular year: The former is more about relationships, attitudes, unconditional empathy, and improvement for its own sake—the latter about achievement, measurable impact, and concrete behaviors. Eulogy virtues vs. resume virtues.

Of course there is considerable overlap between these two spheres, and the distinction is in some cases more about framing than true differentiation. If intention is the engine and goals the steering wheel, the whole vehicle is nevertheless driving toward the same destination: being a better person.

Still, I cannot think of the engine of intention as merely driving change through a mechanistic process. Intention is that, a source of heat, but it is also a source of light. It throws off sparks which, carefully tended, can form an inner beacon.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.
But repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severe decree.