Why Your Goals Keep Failing (Hint: It's Not External)
A framework for realizing what you want—in business, leadership, and life
It’s easy to blame external circumstances for not getting what we want.
The economy. The timing. The competition. The algorithm. The market conditions. Pick your favorite excuse.
Last year, I missed a financial target for my business. It was easy to point and blame the market. I was wrong. It was my lack of discipline in narrowing my attention and focus, and in deeply concentrating on the execution of that focus.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I keep learning—and re-learning: Realizing your full potential is almost entirely within your control.
Not luck. Not timing. Not who you know.
Four things. All internal. All within your power to master.
The Path from Intention to Outcome
There’s a sequence to realizing what you want. Skip a step or half-commit to one, and the outcome slips away:
Intention → Attention → Focus → Concentration → Outcome Realized
Each builds on the last. Each is entirely within your control. And each is where most people—myself included—stumble.
1. Intention
Defining what you want and why it matters
Most people can’t quickly and clearly articulate what they want.
Ask someone about their goals, and you’ll get vague answers: “I want to be successful.” “I want financial freedom.” “I want to make an impact.”
These aren’t intentions. They’re wishes.
An intention is specific. It answers what you want and why it matters to you—your deeper motivation that creates energy when things get hard.
Here’s the simple truth: You can’t get what you want if you’re not clear about what it is. You need to see and feel it from within.
When I examined my missed financial target, the first crack was here. My intention was fuzzy. The “why” wasn’t compelling enough to sustain effort when distractions appeared—and distractions always appear.
What I Practice: I write my intentions down. I read them often—sometimes daily. Before starting work, I remind myself of the why behind each one. I also place visuals within sight of my workspace—on my screensaver, as printouts near my desk. The act of seeing your intention throughout the day keeps you calibrated and connected to it. This isn’t motivation theater. It’s calibration. It gives me energy and sharpens my focus for what actually matters.
2. Attention
Noticing relevant information, resources, and opportunities
Here’s something fascinating about the human mind: When your intentions are clear, you start noticing things you previously missed.
Resources appear. Opportunities surface. Relevant information finds you.
This isn’t magic or manifestation. It’s your brain’s reticular activating system at work—the filter that decides what reaches your conscious awareness. Clarify your intention, and that filter recalibrates.
Looking back at my missed target, this was another failure point. I wasn’t identifying the resources and opportunities that could serve as pathways to my outcome. They were there. I just wasn’t seeing them.
What I Practice: I make time to read and listen to podcasts—not for entertainment, but as inputs that sharpen my awareness. I journal regularly, not to record what happened, but to gain perspective and open my mind to connections I might otherwise miss. These practices keep my attention calibrated to what matters.
3. Focus
Deciding where to direct your attention
Attention is what you notice. Focus is what you choose.
This is where discipline enters. Focus means choosing specific actions over distractions. It means saying “no” to opportunities that don’t directly serve your intention—even good opportunities.
Focus is a muscle. It weakens without regular use and strengthens with deliberate practice.
Ryan Holiday captures this in Discipline is Destiny: “To master anything, we must first master ourselves—our emotions, our thoughts, our actions. It’s an ancient idea more urgent than ever in our distracted, tempting, and chaotic world.”
For me, this was a hard-won lesson. I too easily said “yes” to opportunities without evaluating whether they connected to my stated intentions. Each “yes” felt productive in the moment but scattered my energy across too many fronts.
Over time, I got better at saying “no.” I learned to narrow my focus rather than expand it. Counterintuitively, doing less allowed me to accomplish more.
What I Practice: I manage a daily task list and backlog in Notion. Each morning, I choose what deserves my attention that day—tasks that directly connect to my intentions. When new ideas appear (and they always do), I capture them in the backlog but don’t schedule them immediately. I keep my Notion Kanban board displayed on one of my monitors throughout the day. I also hold a “daily close”—a 15-minute meeting with myself at the end of each day to hold myself accountable to the tasks I committed to. As things happen throughout the day, it’s easy to pursue work that wasn’t on the list. This daily review helps me strengthen my focus muscle.
4. Concentration
Applying sustained effort over time
Results worth having don’t materialize overnight. They require sustained effort—hard work applied consistently over months and years.
You can have perfect clarity, sharp attention, and focused priorities—but still fail to deliver if you can’t concentrate long enough to execute.
This is where most knowledge workers struggle. Random distractions fracture our attention: email notifications, text messages, the phone sitting face-up on the desk, the browser tab you opened “just to check.”
I know this pattern intimately. I’d break my own flow of execution with small interruptions that felt harmless but compounded into hours of lost deep work.
What I Practice: I use a countdown timer—50 minutes of focused work, then 10 minutes to evaluate progress. Something about watching that timer creates accountability. It limits random actions like checking my phone or responding to messages that can wait. The timer is a forcing function for the sustained effort that actually produces outcomes.
AI as a Coach
Tools like Claude or ChatGPT can serve as effective thought partners for this inner work. Use them to clarify vague intentions, pressure-test whether an opportunity aligns with your goals, or reflect your thinking back with clarity. The best coaches ask good questions—AI can do this on demand, without judgment, at any hour. But here’s the catch: AI can only coach you on what you’ve already clarified for yourself. The inner work still starts with you.
December: The Ideal Month for This Work
We’re entering the season when everyone sets goals for the new year. Most of those goals will fail—not because of external circumstances, but because of breakdowns in intention, attention, focus, or concentration.
December is the ideal month to take a different approach.
Before you set goals, do the inner work:
Clarify your intentions. Get specific about what you want and why.
Inspect your attention habits. What are you consuming? What are you noticing?
Audit your focus. Where are you saying “yes” when you should say “no”?
Examine your concentration. What’s breaking your flow? What would protect it?
These four things are within your control. There are no excuses for your reality other than how well you master them.
What’s one area—intention, attention, focus, or concentration—where you know you’re falling short? Take the poll below and share your thoughts in the comments.
For paid subscribers: Join me in our private Slack channel over the next week. I’m hosting a discussion thread where we’ll work through these four areas together and hold each other accountable as we head into the new year. This is the kind of deeper work that’s hard to do alone—let’s do it together.
-James