Sometimes you do everything right—you make a plan, put in effort exactly how you intended to, and things still don’t work out. That can hurt, but most of the time, this isn’t the case.

This is what I call the action-intention gap. It is the difference between how we would intend to do thing...

Closing this gap isn’t easy, but there is a fairly straight-forward process. It has three steps.

The first reason people have a gap is that their intentions weren’t very clear to begin with. If you aren’t even sure what you intended to do, how could you possibly stick with it?

So many dreams die because they were never more than fantasies. If you want to have any chance of improving yo...

The next step is harder. It’s not enough to set goals, intentions or plans. You need to understand who is the person that will be acting on them.

What are your strengths and weaknesses? Why did your goals fail in the past? What obstacles will get in the way and how can you work around them?...

Your end-goal has two parts. The first part, is that your intentions, if followed, should get you where you need to go. If you’re trying to launch a company, learn a language, graduate from college or lose weight, the plan you set has to at least have a decent chance of working out.

The sec...