← Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
Why You Can’t Finish What You Start: Chris Bailey on the Willpower Myth - Episode 147
00:59:40
Why is it so easy to set goals but so hard to follow through? In this exclusive conversation, bestselling author Chris Bailey joins us to unpack insights from his new book Intentional, revealing why willpower fails, how to overcome procrastination, and how to restructure your daily actions to turn ambition into meaningful, intentional accomplishment—especially if you’re a fan of Charles Duhigg or James Clear.
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- [00:01]
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- [01:22]
Chris Bailey
Thus, where intentionality becomes critical again and knowing what goals are your intentions fueling? Is it some goal that is really an expectation that somebody else has of you, or is it something that you actually truly want?
- [01:36]
Dr. JC
Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleepwalking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens.
- [02:26]
Chris Bailey
Makes sense.
- [02:29]
Dr. JC
Today I am thrilled to welcome back the amazing Chris Bailey. You know, not everybody gets a repeat. This is a second appearance on the Makes Sense with Dr. JC podcast, so I'm welcoming back Chris Bailey. I want to start off by just saying that I find Chris to be one of the most insightful thinkers in the field of productivity and performance. And this is something that I love to talk about. I'm going to start off by telling you what I like about you. It's a treat. What I like about Chris is he's spent over a decade researching what it is that makes people actually follow through on what matters most. And I talk about this all the time, so I very much align with that. He's the author of multiple best selling books, so he's cool. In case you were wondering, those are books including the productivity project, Hyper Focus, how to calm your mind. And now we're going to be talking about his latest book, and that is Intentional, which I think most people would just buy because of the name. And this book compiles a decade of research into the true science behind intentional living, which once again, very, very important to me. But more importantly, finishing what you start. And we talk a lot about this on the podcast, in case you didn't know. And that would be because you don't watch YouTube videos. But Chris also has one of the most viewed TED talks of all times. That's how I found him. Originally I watched his TED talk. It was called how to get your brain to focus. It's reached tens of millions of views online. So that's super cool. I'm getting ready to do my first TED talk. So I'm going to be in a bit of comparative reality with Chris, but. But it makes me feel comfortable because I remember he said that he has no idea why it hit. So it's not about the quality, it's just some sort of luck, I guess.
- [04:13]
Chris Bailey
But swept up by an algorithm, what
- [04:15]
Dr. JC
makes Chris genuinely stand out is not just his dad. He's a smart guy, he puts in a lot of work, but it's that he lives the experiments that he talks about. I remember our last discussion, that was something I really loved. And that's doing the deep personal tests on himself and evolving his ideas from real lived experience. I love the angle. When you read his books, you're not just hearing like somebody that's researched things. You know, he puts it to the test and I thought that's cool. So that's exactly the kind of person that we need on this podcast, this show, and that's somebody to help us rethink productivity and what follow through actually means. So, Chris, I want to welcome you back. It's so great to have you here, man.
- [04:55]
Chris Bailey
What a nice intro, man. Yeah, that sounds this great. I love all the pump up before we go. And by the way, you mentioned the comparative thing with the TEDx. I'm doing another TEDx at that same event in like a month and I'm not even thinking about that last one because we're not, I know the next one is like not going to get to tens of. Well, maybe it will. Let's do 100 million with the next one then set myself up for disappointment for sure.
- [05:20]
Dr. JC
Well, maybe we need to adjust your intentionality on that, you know.
- [05:24]
Chris Bailey
Yeah. Oh, oh, oh.
- [05:26]
Dr. JC
So I want to, I want to share something with you. I'm going to put my myself on full view. I want to share with you something that we do and we don't do this for everybody, but when we read a book and it really has an impact and it's profound, what we do is just like you would walk into Borders Books, we showcase it in our Fourier and I'm going to show you what that looks like currently in our house. Look at that. How cool is that? So what we do is we like create our own featured book area. And Intentional is currently on the stand. So that means my wife knows about it. That means my daughter, my daughter reads a lot. So your book is not just being read for the, the sake of this podcast. Pretty cool, huh?
- [06:09]
Chris Bailey
Oh, that's. I like the photo. It's like a shrine almost to the book.
- [06:14]
Dr. JC
That's right. So let's get into this. Really, really excited about this conversation. So the reason why we've got him back, this best selling author Chris Bailey is to talk about his new book Intentional, which he claims he told me this himself, but I'll back it up with with some affirmation myself that, that it's his best work yet. He really excited about it and he has every reason to be. So if you've ever struggled with procrastination or maybe felt trapped in busyness, not business busyness, which is something that I refer to as like fake work or even wondered why your to do list never actually leads to meaningful accomplishment. This conversation is for you. And we're moving past productivity, all the hacks out there and the AI tools and we're going to discuss the behavioral science of actually finishing what you start and how to turn what he says ambition into action. So this is a conversation I've been really excited. I put a lot of work into this one. So you ready for this?
- [07:12]
Chris Bailey
I'm ready, I'm ready. I put no work into it. Well, I wrote the book, but no work into this conversation.
- [07:17]
Dr. JC
You don't have, you don't have to because you, you are this conversation. So. Oh, oh, Chris, you've spent years studying productivity, habit formation, and focus, yet most people still seem to find themselves struggling to finish what it is that they started. So from a behavioral psychology standpoint, here's my question. What is the real scientific reason, in your opinion and from your research, why it is that we procrastinate, even when it has to do with the things that matter most?
- [07:47]
Chris Bailey
Yeah, that's such a good question. So procrastination is this really interesting phenomenon. So when you look at the intentions that we set, they're often quite beautiful, they're often quite grand. We have these big things that we wish to accomplish, but then they meet the reality of our life and our situation and our desires and our relationship with the thing that we want to do on some time scale, but we maybe don't want to do right then and there. And so it's an interesting disconnect a lot of the time, where usually how motivated we are to complete a task is a function of our desire to do the thing, minus the amount of aversion that we have to doing it. So tax season is right around the corner here. And so that's what comes to mind, something that's aversive right now. And if you look at subtract your aversion from your desire, you're probably in the negative with doing your taxes. But you were mentioning the science. Luckily, there is a lot of good science behind these mechanisms and why we gravitate to some things and not others. So procrastination, it turns out there are certain triggers that a task can have that make us more likely to put it off. Whether something is boring, frustrating, unpleasant, unstructured is a really big one. Sometimes we just haven't really plotted out how we're going to do it. Something is far away in the future, we feel less desire to doing it. And the final one, which there's actually a lot of meaning behind as well, is meaning it's how deeply connected something is that we actually do want to do on some level and don't want to do on another, maybe more impulsive level. There is actual science behind what makes certain things meaningful, which kind of adds to the desire that we have to do so. So there's, you know, as you can imagine, when you zoom out from a lot of these factors, intentionality is a very webby sort of thing with a lot of different constellations of ideas that are interrelated and interconnected with one another, from desire to aversion to motivation to values even. There's science behind. So there's a lot at Play. But the procrastination aspect really does come down to that aversion. It's this emotional regulation problem that happens as a response to aversive, ugly stuff that we just don't want to do.
- [10:13]
Dr. JC
Yeah, I mean, I can understand. We don't want to do things that we perceive are going to suck, are going to be hard, or something like that. I love that word, aversion. We're going to get into that. So here's an interesting observation that I have. Just all the people that I work with, I find this topic just so fascinating how somebody could claim to want something and even put a value to it and just not go get it. You know, it. I'm just always led to believe that you must not want it or it must not be important enough. But a lot of high performers out there, and interesting to identify what that even means. But high performers, they feel stuck in what is known as, as you said, the busyness trap. You know, they're constantly busy, which can sometimes unveil the illusion or leave you with the illusion that you're productive, but they're constantly optimizing things, yet they're still deeply unsatisfied. So why, in your opinion, do traditional productivity systems? Because this is what I love about this book, is it takes you to a new place and makes you think about something you didn't think about. But why do traditional productivity systems and massive to do lists? I mean, God, there's so many things for sale out there that people buy and don't do. But the massive to do lists actually end up increasing cognitive load instead of reducing it.
- [11:33]
Chris Bailey
Well, it's interesting on some level how bad we are at measuring our productivity, right? Because how do you measure productivity with knowledge work? Right. It's not really about output anymore. It's about the difference you make, right? If you write 600 lines of code one day and 1200 the next, you might not be as productive with those 1200 lines of code. If you accomplish more in the 600 lines, you had more features and fewer bugs. So the interesting thing is when there's a disconnect between just how long we work for and how much we end up accomplishing, the equation of what it means to even be productive shifts, right? So it used to be about doing more and more and more. Faster, faster, faster, right? If you were working on an assembly line, you can make one widget an hour. And so you worked eight hours, you made eight widgets. And if you worked a bit harder, maybe you made nine widgets with knowledge work it's really in increasingly with, with the AI economy that we're entering into with guidance work, which is kind of a layer on top of knowledge work in a lot of different ways. And it shifts a shift in other ways. It's really not about doing more and more and more, faster, faster, faster. It's about doing the right things deliberately and with intention behind them. That's the shift that matters. But because we're so bad at measuring our productivity, you know, we think, okay, I wrote 1200 lines of code, that was such a productive day. Or we get home and we're just so wiped and have no energy left. And so we think, oh, that must have been a productive day, even if we were just refreshing email all day long or like you were saying. And one of the biggest traps that we can fall into is we look at how busy we are as a proxy measure for how productive we are. But like you were saying, busyness is really no different from an active form of laziness when it doesn't lead us to accomplish anything of importance because we're just on autopilot. We're dealing with what's latest and loudest, most at the top of our to do list. And we're not letting deeper processes actually guide what we're accomplishing in the first place. We're not letting intuition guide us. Right. I love making a long to do list in the sense that it allows me to capture everything that's on my plate. But then there's freedom in that because I know everything's on the to do list. And so I'll think, okay, what do I really want to accomplish after our conversation today? Or I, I have one hour now. What do I really feel like is important to crank out? And then I'll double check my work with the to do list so it doesn't become this, this sort of burden, but it's that intentionality that I think we need to reclaim more than ever before. There's so many different forces that are pulling us into this autopilot mode. But like you were saying, with the highest performers out there, it's not about doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. It's doing the right things deliberately, with intention and with focus, with dedicated time and energy towards them too.
- [14:26]
Dr. JC
I think what we just did, and I'm a recovering workaholic myself, and what's interesting is I still have that inside of me. But now I feel even more shitty about the days that I was a workaholic because I remember during those days I had justified this Idea. I actually was proud of how much work I did. I was feeding the family and all of that stuff. Yet, you know, the effectiveness of it was, was minimal. But I used to think I deserve some sort of a badge of honor because I worked so hard. And that's because my perception was out. It's an interesting reality that we're living in right now because everything is promoting like hacking and efficiency. Like we spoke about this a little bit on the last show, but right now it just seems like everybody's kind of chasing that next productivity hack or using AI for productivity as a tool. And it's all about saving time, getting more done, leveraging your time and everything, which is ironically, completely the opposite of what happens very often. But you argue that intentional living is more powerful than efficiency. This is a very potentially controversial statement which I'm aligned with. But why is intentionality more effective than just being better at something like time management?
- [15:41]
Chris Bailey
It's ultimately what you accomplish. And so this is, I think, you know, you can focus on a lot of stuff with productivity advice, but at the end of the day, you're left with the difference that you make, right? What's different in your work, what's different in the world? Because you lived, you worked a day of your life. That's all that really matters, right? And so much of a part of that is determining what are you going to even be productive on. You know, in the book, I call it our self reflective capacity. If you never tap into your self reflective capacity, your productivity is going to be toast. You're just going to work on what's latest and loudest. You'll do the thing that's most recent in your email inbox. You know, it is on some level about the time leverage that we have, right? And this is what I do love about AI tools, cloud coworks, stuff like that. They, for every unit of our time, they increase the amount of leverage we have over it, right? We're able to accomplish more in that same amount of time. But that only makes intentionality more important, right? Because how are you guiding not only your own intentions, but your intentions of your colleagues, your employees, your AI agents? Increasingly around the corner, we're not only guiding our own intentions, we're guiding the intentions of other people too. And so when we have more leverage over our time, the intentionality behind what we're doing is even more critical. Right? And so what that means is productivity looks a bit different. So one of the most productive things I'm finding that I can do these days is just Going for walks, walks. A CEO can go on a walk and come up with a billion dollar insight that completely changes the direction of their company in a one hour walk or something, right? Just to the coffee shop across town and back. And we all have these kind of similar moments where we tap into our self reflective capacity. Maybe we don't get to the billion dollar point, but we get to a point where we come to the realization of what we need to do, of where we need to put our time, our attention and our energy, what we need to funnel all of those into in order to make an outsized difference. And so this is the fundamental thing that I think we all need to internalize with productivity, which is that not all tasks are created equal. For every minute we spend mentoring a new employee, we'll make many, many more minutes back than one minute just in a pointless meeting or doing water cooler chit chat or whatever it might be. And that's the key. Know that you have that time leverage. And that is what makes becoming more intentional so critical. By tapping into that self reflective capacity and choosing where we wish to even go in the first place and where we even wish to guide other people to go, that increased, that's one of the highest leverage things that we can do. So it is about leverage on some level, I think. But I think leverage looks different and increasingly it's going to look more like wandering as we have more intentions to guide not just our own, but of agents and people too.
- [18:39]
Dr. JC
Man, it's so fun how you can put words together that you know, but then all of a sudden because you put them together in a certain way, they mean something. I just love the awareness of self reflective capacity. I mean like, God, wouldn't that be great if we thought about that a little bit more often? You know, like if we ran a little bit of quality control over our activities in that way. Have you ever heard of a person named Lee Zlatov? Do you know that name?
- [19:08]
Chris Bailey
No, I don't. No.
- [19:09]
Dr. JC
So you're gonna love this and it'll very much validate what you're saying. So Liz Latov, you actually, everybody in the world knows who he is because of what he's done. You just know him by a different name. He's the creative genius behind MacGyver. And okay, MacGyver was a very popular TV show. To MacGyver, things is in the dictionary. It's just amazing what he did. But he was just on the show. And it's great because your show will come up like right after his, his Story that he shared to your point is that he would very often be asked to like in a crunch, like write the scripts for like three more shows. And this was like the world was watching this show turned into a Broadway play and a movie and everything like that.
- [19:51]
Chris Bailey
I didn't know they made a Broadway show. That's actually crazy.
- [19:54]
Dr. JC
Pretty entertaining crazy. You'll hear the story. But yeah, what he said to your point is that what he used to do to come up with the ideas is not go up to a whiteboard and try to figure it out. He said he would go take a shower and while he was in the shower, he would have these strokes of genius and then just write it out. So the funny story behind him is that he was so certain of that, like you are with taking a walk, that if he was on set and they said, hey, we need this now, he would actually go find a hotel, check in and take a shower. How funny is that? So, and, and when people hear the story about the walk or, or something like that, they could laugh at it and think it's crazy, but isn't it true? So, you know, you step away and maybe that's the time to self reflect and that creative genius comes out. I just love it.
- [20:42]
Chris Bailey
You know, that self reflective capacity, it is one of the deepest places intention can come from too.
- [20:47]
Dr. JC
You could have bad intentions.
- [20:50]
Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, well, intentions come from all sorts of different places. And this was, I was actually struggling a bit looking at the research on where intention comes from. And so I started chatting with Buddhist monks. And one Buddhist monk that I talked to, he essentially put together the research in a synthesis in such an interesting way. I asked him where, where do intentions come from? And he mentioned all the, you know, our biology, right, we have to go to the washroom. And so we make an intention to, you know, stop at the next rest station or whatever. On a road trip. We have the desire to avoid pain and experience pleasure. We learn things, right? We listen to podcasts, we, we learn things. And so that is a reflective loop. But the deepest place that he mentions that our intentions can come from, the truest place, is that self reflective capacity. That's the word that he used. And if you look at the research behind it, and I don't find stats that motivating, I'll be honest, but it's quite remarkable and you'll see it bear fruit. In practice, we think about our goals 14 times as often. When our mind is wandering versus when we're focused, we think about the future. 48% of the time that our mind is wandering. Sampling studies from Jonathan Smollwood, Jonathan Schooler found. So there's this incredible creativity and intentionality benefit which ends up making us more productive in the long run. And so it doesn't feel like work, but you're right. And it, you know, there is the make fun of factor. But when I get busiest, I go for the most walks because I just need to file everything away.
- [22:24]
Dr. JC
I love that. So on that we live in this world now and you know, the whole body of my work, this podcast, the book and everything is just acknowledging that without even knowing it, the world is kind of doing the thinking for us. That's, that's something that people are unconscious. So yeah, how should people think and use maybe AI, maybe think differently about AI productivity tools without unconsciously outsourcing their intentions?
- [22:53]
Chris Bailey
Well, you know, I think a lot of people have talked about having AI as having an intern and I don't think that's actually been true up to this point. You know, it's, it's something that sounded good, but now with apps like Claude, Cowork and I'm sure and openclaw and all these different things, my openclaw instances right underneath the computer here, it's really secured down, there's no security out of the box. It's very much early days with this stuff. But I would suggest thinking of AI as something that you're guiding the intentions of and so you're not only responsible for your own intentions now you're responsible for the intentions of machines because it can do thinking work. But the ultimate thinking is what to think about in the first place, what to logic on, what to reason on in the first place. And that's all about that intentionality. It's about taking that step back, doing that self reflective capacity thing. And I think one key to internalize with intentions that are our own, that are of AI, of machines, all this stuff is that there are different levels of intentionality that are in our life and that we can guide machines into doing so. There's the broader goals, that which maybe take place over, I don't know, six months or a year, then we have the plans that flow down from those goals. That's what we do every week, every month. Then we have the smaller plans, then we have the intentions that we set every day, the things that are on our to do list. A to do list is really just a place where we store our intentions. It's a list of stored intentions. And so that I think is the key is to always have a Clear sight of how your daily intentions and actions flow into these broader goals that you have, which hopefully are motivated by what are your strongest values. Because there's a lot of interesting research behind values as well. The 12 values that we all share in different amounts, but that, that motivate us uniquely. Everything from self direction to stimulation, to pleasure, to. To conformity, to benevolence or universalism. So that I think is the key when you're looking at guiding your own intentions and the intentions of others, whether those others be people or increasingly machines. As we go from doing more knowledge work to doing guidance work, which I see as almost a cousin of knowledge work, but at much higher level where you're guiding systems to doing knowledge work on your behalf. Strategy and intention is never more critical as it is in an environment like that, where there's so much leverage over your time that you don't want to waste it. You don't want to blow that opportunity because you only have so many, call them tokens. With AI, you only have so much time yourself, attention yourself. Your team only has so much time and attention. So the intentionality that precedes our actions we should see as it is almost like the wood behind an arrow. Right. It allows us to travel forward in the right direction and it's absolutely essential that we have it there. But I think the key is know that there's all these different levels of intention in your life, in the lives of the systems that you're guiding as well. I integrate them in the book into a model called the intention stack. It's a simple, you know, values, then priorities, then goals, then plans, then daily intentions that kind of flow down into one another. But that alignment, I don't think has ever been more critical as it is today when. When intention means more now than it has.
- [26:31]
Dr. JC
Yeah. I'm going to ask you some questions about the stacking. You know what's funny? I just love my wife to pieces. And that's not just because she watches this, but so I'm always working really hard on communication with her and that's a big thing. So it's interesting because whenever there's some sort of a misunderstanding, what needs to happen is that you have to figure out how to explain what your intentions were. Because you can have good intentions in your workday or in a conversation, but there's also the execution of it. And I think that AI is dangerous in that sense, but I'm just kind of peeling it all back and realizing that when you're working with like chat GPT or something like that, which is a phenomenal thing. I mean, I have many uses for it and like we said before, there's a chance that I might actually be AI. It's the prompt, you know, we still have control over the prompt and it'd be interesting to just consider letting ChatGPT know what your intention is for what you're asking. It's pretty cool. Here's an interesting question that I didn't hear a lot about in the book, but I know that know how to answer it. Where does gratitude fit in this? I, I speak very often about the struggle people have to unwrap the present moment. And I just find personally that I could do some self reflection and capture an intention that I had at another time or that's projected into the future. But I find that if I really like during meditation or maybe that's what happens on the walk or the shower. Gratitude is something that only exists in the present moment. It's what you have, not what you have not, or what you've lost. Where does gratitude fit into this formula?
- [28:17]
Chris Bailey
Oh, I love that question. And it's not something I've thought of, but I do have thoughts on gratitude. You know, every night when my wife and I are falling asleep together, I travel a lot. But when, when we're both at home, the last thing we do in the day before we go to sleep is recall three things that we're grateful for. And yes, a couple of people have asked like, do you ever run out of things? And if anything, you know, you realize that this gratitude is a sk that you can develop over time. And at first it's like, oh, I don't want to even pick one or two. What are one or two things that I'm good. But now I could list 10 things each and every night probably. And gratitude is quite a beautiful thing. And it's, you know, this beautiful shortcut to abundance, I think where you know, you tap into the self reflective capacity and all that you have which leads to that feeling of abundance and honestly opportunity. And that's where my mind goes to with this question is yeah, intentionality is really about an opportunity, right? Because regardless of the context that you're operating in, there's different currencies that you're going to want to optimize for probably, right? If you're at work, you're probably optimizing for maybe impact, right? How much of a difference you can make for other people. Maybe it's money and pure accomplishment, maybe it's productivity. And so yeah, having the self direction to do incredible things. But maybe you're at home and so you're optimizing for meaning. Right. And so abundance is a great way to experience greater meaning too. So I think an intention to express gratitude, it leads us to see more opportunities in the intentions that we have because things just become richer in that way.
- [30:06]
Dr. JC
I like the idea of looking at gratitude, almost like taking the shower or going for the walk, is that it puts you in a healthy space to self reflect as well. I love that.
- [30:18]
Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, no scarcity.
- [30:20]
Dr. JC
Cool. Yeah, I was pretty psyched about that question. I'm not gonna lie. Okay, so Charles Duhigg, I hope I pronounce his name right, describes intentional as a guide to turning ambition into action. What's the missing link behind goal setting that most people completely overlook?
- [30:41]
Chris Bailey
Okay. I have a lot of thoughts about goals after doing a deep dive into them. I think we get goals wrong personally, and there's a lot of research about goals and I learned as much about intentionality and goal attainment from monks than I did from the research and the scientists themselves. But I think one thing that we really get wrong with goals is what a goal even is. I've really come to see a goal as a prediction. A goal is a prediction of where we believe our current and our planned actions will take us.
- [31:21]
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- [31:52]
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- [32:14]
Chris Bailey
I don't know if you've ever tried predicting the future, but if you have, you've probably realized just how big, bad we are at predicting the future. Like these futurists that are, you know, there's, there's so many of them out there, people don't follow up with futurists. I feel if they did There would be fewer futurists because we're so bad at predicting the future. We don't even know what's around the corner, what world events are going to happen, what stock market events are going to happen, all. All this stuff. So a goal is really just that prediction of where we believe our current and our planned actions will take us. But the risk that we face is we then become attached to that prediction, which when we see it for what it is, we should really be holding it a bit more loosely because our predictions are rarely accurate. But we. We should be holding it a bit more loosely because there's a risk that predictions can turn into expectations for how things will go, which when we realize that those expectations and predictions were wrong, we're off. Will lead to disappointment. And then we just are hard on ourselves at the end of this cycle. And then we go back to setting another goal which is really a prediction again, maybe the next New Year's or whenever. And so I think that's something that we get wrong with. Goals is what they even are, which kind of sets us up for that disappointment, but holding them a bit more loosely, editing our goals, doing a. A weekly goal review. I'm a big fan of just reviewing a list of my goals once a week. That is. It's a wonderful way to actually iterate on these goals, to edit them so we don't see them as something that's set in time. That has to be, you know, something that's either a pass or fail. It can be something that we carry with us so that whatever little core of intentionality, the little molten core of intentionality that lives inside every single goal that we set, as we revise it, we kind of shave away and we shape the. The outer layer of the goal for. So that it's something that we actually want so we don't lose a grip of those intentions that we've set in the first place. So I think we get so much wrong with the spirit of goals and what goals even are, not to mention the execution of them too. Does that make sense, the molten core analogy?
- [34:29]
Dr. JC
No, no, no. I love it. The way I would have answered that question is probably very similar that, you know. And once again I said at the beginning, you know, the body of my work would make sense and this is what my book will help people do. It's not just about giving people guidance. It's about pointing things out that are going on. Like the idea that a lot of the things that you think are right to do, you've been taught that way, you know, so goal setting for one, the idea of modifying your goal, like you said, that's not what a lot of books say. It's, you know, they say set it and get it and set it and forget it. Yeah. Never, never, never stop. And I could say that in some cases that was a good idea, but it was probably the right as well. I love that. So I want to get into the intention stacking. You introduced the concept of an intention stack and you mentioned it briefly. And that links things like values, habits, and our daily actions. First of all, make sure we, we understand what it means to stack intentions because it seems like that's a nice high leverage activity. But how does stacking intentions help people make finishing what they start feel like almost automatically? I like that idea. Yeah.
- [35:41]
Chris Bailey
Yeah. So, and so visualize in your mind a funnel shaped thing. And it's only a funnel shaped thing because it's three dimensional. But essentially in our life we have all different lengths of time across which we're intentional. We have the daily intentions, the, the tiniest intentions that we set to tire shoelaces or something to go for a run. But then we have the plans that these small intentions fit into. So tying our shoelaces to go for a run, very tiny intention, might fit into a broader plan to get a running time down to a certain level or something, which might fit into a broader goal above that to run a marathon or something in a certain amount of time, which might fit into a priority like our health, which might fit into a value at the top which may be, let's say, security. So we feel safe and sound in our own body. And the problem with a lot of goals, you know, I'm saying there's a lot wrong with a lot of goals in my opinion. They're not just predictions that turn into expectations and then disappointment, but they're so often just little islands in our life. We don't really think, okay, what would make this actually meaningful? What would actually make me care about this easiest way to tell if something's a priority for you. You've done it already. Right. So there's often something fundamental about a goal that isn't connected with our values, with our motivational nature. So There are these 12 values that are the broadest intentions that we have in our life. And by the way, I should say, when it comes to values, whenever I hear the term, I've heard the term, my mind kind of glazes over and I think, oh, values again. What comes to mind is one of those cheesy exercises where some consultant brings in like a list of hundreds of them and you circle which ones are you? I just want to circle the whole page, you know, there's nothing I really disagree with. But the research shows there's 12. There's self direction, stimulation, pleasure, achievement, power, face, which is how we come across to other people. Security, that can be health related. I have them in front of me here, so I'm cheating. I shouldn't get too much credit for this. Tradition is another one, right? The customs and norms and rituals. We love conformity, which is abiding by the expectations we have of ourselves and that other people have of us. Humility is a fundamental human value, recognizing our insignificance in a lot of cases, in the grand scheme of things. Universalism, which is protecting the welfare of people and of nature and benevolence, which is kindness. So these 12 values, we all have some top ones and some low ones. And then you put them all together in a cauldron and that unique concoction that comes up, you know, that at the end of it is it's us, it's our personality. But it's ultimately fundamentally what motivates us into action. You know, values are our true motivational nature. So if you find that you're motivated by security or self direction or pleasure, aligning your goals with those can be extraordinarily helpful. Maybe one of your goals is get a six pack by a beach seat, something like that. But you're not motivated by the goal, which is really connected with face in that case, which is how we come come across other people. But maybe you do value pleasure above anything else. This is, I'm speaking from experience here. This is my problem with fitness is I value pleasure too much. I want to eat a funnel cake after a workout. That's the issue. That's the issue. But what I find is that when I make my workout about pleasure, the motivation just follows naturally, right? If I make the gym into a spa like experience, I'll go every damn day of the week. And so goals shouldn't be this island. They need to be something that is connected to not only that broad motivational nature that drives everything that we do, but our daily actions, which is where the rubber actually meets the road. So we actually make progress towards these things and something beautiful, frankly happens when all of these different components are aligned. And it's not always possible, right? We sometimes just have to do stuff we don't want to do. And we have to overcome our procrastination through other techniques. And means and stuff like that. But it's more possible than we think to align those goals that we have with our broader motivations, which is our values and the daily actions that we have. And there's a lot of rituals, too, that can let them funnel down into one another.
- [40:15]
Dr. JC
I love everything that you said there. And that's another important thing to assess is just this whole concept of your values.
- [40:23]
Chris Bailey
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Dr. JC
A lot of people don't believe that they can achieve things and they think that's their problem. And I very often have conversations with them about saying, I'm going to prove to you that there's a version of you that can achieve anything if there's enough value in what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And they're like, there's no way you're going to do that. And I said, okay, so, Chris, we're. We're in a pool together, which is strange to begin with, but if I take your head and I push it underwater, what is the hell, man? What is. What is your greatest value? What would you say?
- [40:55]
Chris Bailey
Oh, a breath.
- [40:57]
Dr. JC
Except.
- [40:57]
Chris Bailey
Please.
- [40:58]
Dr. JC
So. So you'll. So you'll make attempts, you know, to. To wiggle out. But Dragon is pretty strong and he's holding you underwater, which is fucked up too.
- [41:06]
Chris Bailey
But, yeah, it's.
- [41:07]
Dr. JC
But then you realize. Then you realize you're in a jam. What happens to your desire for the air? Does it go up or down?
- [41:15]
Chris Bailey
I really want some air.
- [41:16]
Dr. JC
Exactly. So what I show people is, what will you not do to get that air? And they realize that they're that version of them, because the value is so high, will stop at nothing short of dying to get that air. So that very often helps people reframe and get back to that space. So I love that topic, you know, and just for the record, when you go buy Chris's book, and I highly recommend that you do that, you'll notice that on the bottom of the page it will say, we recommend some of Chris's other books as well. I personally recommend to people that they buy Hyperfocus and this book because I just think. I mean, he definitely hits all of the top topics in that, but I just think that that's probably why I enjoyed it so much as I read them both and I was sharing with him before that. I actually, I'm a little bit of a nerd, but I really am into the idea of reading the book and listening to the audible as well, because then you get to have Chris read you the book.
- [42:13]
Chris Bailey
Review my narration. How was it that's it.
- [42:15]
Dr. JC
It was F. You have a. You have a great, great voice. It. It actually sounds just like your voice. So I don't know.
- [42:21]
Chris Bailey
Good.
- [42:21]
Dr. JC
I don't know if it was AI, but it's. It was perfect.
- [42:23]
Chris Bailey
Nope, not AI. So, man, that would be a horrible future, eh?
- [42:27]
Dr. JC
In your earlier work with, like, hyperfocus, you explained attention, so we've been talking about intention. How does intentional living change the way that we approach, like, deep work and focus blocks and digital distractions? I'm kind of curious to know. Does intentional living, just being intentional, carry the ability to override some of the distractions? Because that's what I find interesting about it is I like the idea that it sets me up to get a better quality of output from myself.
- [43:01]
Chris Bailey
Yeah.
- [43:01]
Dr. JC
What are your thoughts on that?
- [43:02]
Chris Bailey
Yeah. When you have that alignment, I think you really do need less willpower. Right. So focus and managing attention becomes exhausting when we have to regulate ourselves. And so, you know, we don't want to focus on something or our phone is right there going off, and so we have to ignore that to do that. That will really SAP our energy and the limited pool of mental resources. We have to just focusing and being present in the. The moment. When we have that natural motivational alignment. Things actually do feel kind of effortless with what we're doing. It's kind of like what I was saying. The easiest way to tell if something's a priority is if you've done it already. The easiest way to tell if something's a value to you is you already spend your time in that way. So if you value security above all else, so you want, you know, maybe you're into optimizing for longevity and saving a high proportion of your income and for financial security and all that stuff. If you align your goals with security, you're gonna be more motivated to achieve them. Right. If that workout ritual is no longer about face and it's about, you know, I want to feel good in my body for the next 60 years or whatever, 70 years, whatever it might look like. So the frame is different, but the alignment means that we need less actual willpower and we need to regulate ourselves less. So it's really the regulation that's a problem. So when we make things feel effortless, it's kind of second nature to do them.
- [44:28]
Dr. JC
Motivation, that's so fascinating. I think one of the biggest farces that we've kind of learned and been conditioned is that you need things like timing, willpower, motivation as precursors to take action. Yeah. You know, many People believe and focus on that idea that it's all about discipline or willpower. But you know, it's definitely more than that. You know, I love the idea of I'll learn those things along the way. But if I want something and I have set my intentions, which is so many different facets, I'm just going to go after it kind of like my head's underwater. And what's interesting about willpower, motivation and timing is they seem to show up along the way. And I think a lot of people miss that. One of my favorite concepts, and you mentioned the word briefly before, but I'm just so fascinated with aversion. You know, we all have this kind of like abort switch and, and I know where it comes from. You know, we used to have to run from dinosaurs and things like that. But you know, we don't have dinosaurs. We have like bills and people saying mean things to us now. But one of my favorite concepts from the book is aversion. And it's kind of like that quiet little note in your head. How can people distinguish between healthy resistance, which is important, and self sabotage?
- [45:50]
Chris Bailey
Hmm, that's such, that's such an interesting question because aversion really is present in both. That's where intentionality becomes critical again. And knowing what goals are your intentions fueling? Is it some goal that is really an expectation that somebody else has of you, or is it something that you actually truly want? So this is the interesting thing about goal editing is what I'd go back to actually is if you have this goal that you're editing and you just can't find the motivation for it, that's often a sign to drop it, to drop the goal entirely. Because in a lot of cases the goal won't be aligned to who you are, to what you value, to actually what you want to get out of your day and out of your life. But then you're going to have the ones that are like lower cholesterol because the doctor said so that you don't want to do that, you know, are essential nonetheless. And so I think for any little goal that you have like that, you need to be able to look at what is the broader thing that I'm after here. If it's health, if it's something fundamental in life, then it might be worth pursuing. You know, tap into that self reflective capacity. You'll probably find the right answer. But when it turns out that it was really just an expectation that somebody else had of you, it could be time for a drop. And so aversion is a signal, right? It's a signal that we don't want to do something. And some of the things that we don't want to do, we really should do. And so we do need some reflective layer there to do that. One strategy, just to kind of leave this answer on a tactical note that I love is I call it aversion journaling. So if you find you're working on something ugly or maybe even fugly that you don't want to do, you just, you know, you grab a notepad, you grab a pen, and you journal about, why is it that this is so ugly? Why is it that this is something that I don't want to do? What is it putting off? Is it boring? Is it frustrating? Is it unpleasant? Is it unstructured? Is it not meaningful or connected with my. Is it too far away? And so I just don't care about it at all. So give yourself a choice to either journal about what's making it so aversive, or do the thing and I do this myself. You kind of trap yourself into working on it in this way where you journal a little bit, and then you get to the point where you realize where the aversion is coming from. So you can work through a problem like that logically, which activates the logical center of your mind. Because procrastination is a purely visceral emotional reaction to something that we're interpreting as aversive. To actually get to work through that aversion, to kind of look at what branches off from that, like one branch leads to, you know, this is just not something I really want upon some reflection. But maybe there's a core, that molten nugget, that molten core of the goal that I really want to bring and revise this goal into something that is more meaningful. Or maybe it's something that it's like, why did this even make its way onto my list in the first place? So that is, you know, aversion is such a helpful signal. It's kind of like guilt in a way. Guilt can be a very helpful signal that we're not spending our time in the best possible way. Aversion can be a signal that you're not spending your time in the best possible way. Or it could be a sign that you need to change your relationship with what you're doing, which is what overcoming aversion is all about.
- [49:27]
Dr. JC
This is a very interesting topic. Maybe the next book you'll write is called Aversion or something. Because one of. One of the biggest challenges is that we also need a version. You know, there is value to me feeling that something's not right for me and listening to that voice, but it's just about filtering out the idea that it might be self sabotage. So I love the journaling concept. In my book I introduced a concept called the sorting filter and it's such a cool thing because all it really says is that like the journaling, when you're in that moment and you're kind of just like maybe feeling the feels of aversion rather than just letting your knee jerk reaction do it, because there's a lot of risk in that. I always tell people to just say, huh, hence the hat. And what that means is hmmm. It means haven't made up my mind yet. I'm going to just pause a little cognitive distancing and run it through a sorting filter and ask it different questions. One of my favorite questions to ask myself is what else might be true. So this is a fascinating part of it because, and I wanted to bring it up because Chris is not saying never listen to aversion and always look to overcome it. He's just saying look out for the aversion trap of sorts because you know, it probably is due to some sort of outside programming or force, you know, so I'm a book geek and I've read a lot of books and I think I know the answer to this. A lot of people have compared your book to these are big books, but atomic habits, fantastic book, getting things done, books like that. And these are fantastic books and we're not downplaying them. But what does your work add to those conversations that those frameworks don't fully address? Because that's, that's what I noticed about your book that I loved.
- [51:22]
Chris Bailey
Oh, how do I answer this? In a non biased way. I think I remember when I wrote my first book, which was called the Productivity Project. One of the blurbs that I got was from an author named Marshall Goldsmith. He's written a lot of big books, you know, blanking on some of the exact names. It was like, what got you here? Won't get you there. Who move my cheek? I'm probably getting these wrong, but there's some big books. And in the blurb I remember him describing that book as Practical Buddhism at its finest. And I thought, oh, that's kind of weird. I remember reading that thing. Oh, that's kind of weird. But now here I am four books later. Well, this is book number four. I don't know if you count the audible original as a book. I'm not counting it. I feel a book should be physical in your hand, you know, and I think that's kind of the spirit that I've taken with me is, you know, what I love to do with these books is look at the causes and effects within our mind. You know, looking at the research of it all that looks at the mind from the outside in, but looking at the nature of the mind as well, looking from the inside out on a topic like goal attainment. And so I love looking at the mental side of things, the mental performance side of things. What are the ingredients of mental performance? How does this capacity of intention work within our mind, within our environment? And so it's very much, you know, looking at the causes and effects of things and then making a bridge from those causes and effects, both internally, externally, from the inside out, the outside in, making a bridge from those to the practical, tactical things. We need to be doing either the same or different or better on a daily basis in order to optimize for this essentially limited mental capacity that we have. So one of my fundamental frustrations with being a human is this limited mental capacity, though. I wish we could have two or three conversations at one time. I wish multitasking could work. I wish I could read a book in like five minutes, you know. But we have these fundamental limits, these constraints of our mind, so we need to have the tools to make better use of these. Looking at the science, looking at the spirit of the causes and effects and conditions that lead to the arise of certain factors, including attention, including intention. So I think that's what I try to do. I don't know how that differentiates these books in the scheme of things, but I, I hope it's almost like a more human take in a lot of different ways for the subject of productivity. That can feel cold sometimes, honestly.
- [54:13]
Dr. JC
Yeah. And just for the record, that's why I said what, what do you add to the conversation? I just, I just had an idea for a collaboration that we could do. We could write a book together. And Jim Quick won't like this because his book is limitless, he's one of my best friends. But let's write a book called Limited. Yeah. And just, and just acknowledge, even though you look at the miraculous human being and the sense making machine and we have these five senses, it's, it's just astounding and we don't even remotely use it to its capacity, but it's limited. We know through science that we only get a slice of reality and we make the rest of the stuff up. So what I. I'll share. I'm not afraid of stepping on toes. I'll share. What I. I think you bring to the table is we look at books like that and we look at a lot of stuff that's out there and biohacking. I've got a guest coming on after you tomorrow who's world famous Biohacking. And he's. He's got all the information about longevity and. And then you have Atia's book outlived. There's all this stuff out there about here is what you need to do to get that. But my favorite quote, and this is one of the tenets of my book, is that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works. So there's a lot of stuff out there that would be a great idea to do, but if something like your intentions are not in alignment with it, well, you're just not going to be the right person for the job. And there might be some precursor steps to evolve to it. So that's what I got out of your book is I was like, I was cooking a meal and I liked it, but your book gave it a little bit more spice, and I was like, oh, I like it more now. So for anybody that is a big fan of all of that stuff out there, but you find that you don't follow through with it, that's a frustrating feeling. So you read Chris's book, and that might be something that unlocks that. So I guess this would be my last question. If somebody's listening today, and a lot of people will be, and they feel maybe overwhelmed, stuck, frustrated, which is everybody, or at least the ones that are willing to admit it, and they're frustrated that they're not living up to their potential. You know, we've brought that up a couple times. What does Chris Bailey suggest as the first intentional shift that they should make today?
- [56:33]
Chris Bailey
Yeah, here's one of my favorite productivity rituals, and stop me if I mention this on the last one, but I've been doing it for a decade. It's my favorite, not only intention ritual, but prioritization ritual, and it's called the rule of three. So all you do is at the start of the day, before you do anything, you fast forward to the end of the day in your head and you ask, what are the three main things I'll want to have accomplished by the days? And that's it. That's all. But in choosing only three, you choose a lot of other stuff that you don't Prioritize, right? You choose which intentions that you have that day, rise above the others. So I do this every single morning, and I do this every Sunday too, for the week ahead. So that when I set the daily intentions, I can look up a little bit to that broader timeline, to the weekly intentions, and think, okay, how do these connect here? How do these flow? What can I bite off every day? On a work side, I set three. On a personal side, I set three intentions. What can I bite off on a given day so that I can actually make the progress that will make my weekly goals a reality? Then you can set broader intentions than that three yearly intentions. I actually don't set intentions that aren't daily, weekly, or yearly, but I'm always revising the yearly ones. You know, there are things I'm constantly editing and iterating on as I achieve them and as I change them and as I get better at them. And so the weekly ones, you can look to the yearly goals to see how that flows into that too. And then when setting the yearly goals, you can look at, okay, how do these actually align with this motivational nature that I have? Which are my top values, My top two or three values, in my case, self direction and pleasure. I'm very driven by pleasure, so if I want to bribe myself into like a delicious sushi lunch or something, I can successfully do that. So the rule of three. Fitting the daily with the weekly with the general goals that you have, and then fitting your general ones with your values. Even if you don't pick up this book, that's something you can do right away that I think will really help you out.
- [58:43]
Dr. JC
Whenever I speak to you, you have this way of inserting, once again, there's nothing new in the world. You know, there's. There's just a different way of looking at things. And that's. That's what I got out of this book and your other book as well in our conversations, is you just have this ability to invite people to entertain another aspect of something that very often could be the missing link. You know, I think a lot of people are going through life just thinking that they suck. I actually feel like everybody is extremely capable, as capable as anyone. They're just scattered and, you know, not focused, perhaps. So that's another reason why I love reading that book. First, I just want to share kind of my big takeaway with, from. From this book and just tell you that I really, really enjoyed it. I. I love reading in general and I can pull something out of every book. Chris and I were talking about, you know, there's statistics out there that most people don't finish books. You know, there's. It's just statistical. So I can honestly say that there's a couple of books I haven't finished. Like, I got it. But this is not one of those, you know, this is a book that I really, really did enjoy. Not just because I had to get ready for this podcast, but my takeaway is that this book feels kind of like the missing layer. And I've kind of alluded to this several times. Behind goal setting, this is the big thing that I see, because a lot of people set goals, but they don't get goals. And it's not about more discipline. It's not about motivation, but clarity of intention. And I always say clarity before action. If you're in action mode and it's not working, I just think that you just need to go back and get clear on some things. And that's what I love about this. But clarity of intention, intentional doesn't just help people get more stuff done. It actually helps them get the right things done. And that. I almost get the chills when I think about that, because that sounds delicious. So in my personal opinion, if you've struggled with procrastination, burnout, or maybe finishing what you start, this is one of the most important books that you can read in 2026. So, Chris, so grateful for this second conversation. Really, really a big fan. And I'm just so happy that I watched that TED Talk. And thank you. Thank you for being on the show.
- [61:08]
Chris Bailey
Thank you for the nice words. It means, means a lot. I'm quite proud of this book. It feels special to me. So I'm so happy that. That you think the same. Thank you so much for having me on, man. My name is Chris Bailey. This podcast makes sense.
- [61:22]
Dr. JC
That's it for today. To support the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. Be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the Makes Sense substack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learned something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time.
- [61:51]
Chris Bailey
Makes sense.
- [61:55]
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- [62:47]
Dr. JC
If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe.
- [62:52]
Chris Bailey
It really does help the show to grow.
- [62:54]
Dr. JC
Thank you for listening.