Designing a life on purpose (vs following the herd)

For a few years in college, I lived a life I never actually chose. I bunked the classes I found dull, wandered around, binged on TV, crashed into bed, and did it all again the next day. From the outside it looked like freedom. From the inside it was just drift — a current carrying me somewhere I’d never picked.

The thing that finally woke me up wasn’t a goal. It was envy. I watched friends crack the IIM entrances, start businesses, travel, build things. And I felt this hot, uncomfortable gap between their lives and mine. The honest part — the part I sat with much later — is that they weren’t smarter than me. They were just steering. I wasn’t.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to make peace with: not being intentional is also a decision. Just a really bad one. It’s a decision to let circumstances, defaults, and other people’s expectations write your story for you.

You’re probably running on autopilot right now

When I first read that something like 90% of our daily choices happen with no conscious awareness, I was shaken. Ninety percent. Most of your day — what you eat, what you check first on your phone, how you react to your spouse, whether you open the laptop or the OTT app — isn’t really “chosen” at all. It’s just running.

Daniel Kahneman has the cleanest language for this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes two systems in the mind: System 1, fast and automatic, the one humming along in the background; and System 2, slow and deliberate, the one that actually weighs things. The catch is that System 2 is lazy. It mostly rubber-stamps whatever System 1 already decided. So unless you deliberately wake it up, you live almost entirely on autopilot.

We become what we surround ourselves with — the food we eat, the people we spend time with, the habits we absorb. If you’re not careful, you end up living a life that doesn’t reflect who you actually are.

And autopilot has a default destination: the herd. We’re social creatures. We’ve survived precisely because we look to others for cues on what to want, what to fear, what counts as success. That instinct kept our ancestors alive. But pointed at modern life — a feed engineered to make you compare, a culture that sells you someone else’s milestones as your own — that same instinct quietly walks you off your own path. FOMO does the rest.

Why “just decide to be intentional” doesn’t work

For a long time my fix was the obvious one: try harder. Want it more. Resolve, on a Sunday night, to be a different person by Monday.

It never held. And the Delta-4 lens — Kunal Shah’s idea that we only switch behaviours permanently when the new way is a big, roughly four-point jump better than the old one — explains exactly why. In the moment of choice, the unconscious default is a Delta-4 over the intentional one. Scrolling delivers a hit in zero seconds. Reflecting on what you actually want delivers… discomfort, uncertainty, and a payoff you can’t see yet. Of course autopilot wins. It has the better UX.

So “be more intentional” framed as willpower is you grinding uphill against your own wiring. The smarter move is to treat intentional living as a design problem — make the conscious choice the easy one, so you don’t have to fight yourself every single day.

That’s the whole spine of how I think about change now: moving from effort to effortless. You install a little structure once, on purpose, so the right default runs on autopilot later.

How I started steering

None of this is theory for me. These are the levers that actually pulled me out of the drift.

1. Name your non-negotiables. Before goals, before plans — values. I had to sit down and write the short list of things I refuse to compromise on, no matter what. Mine settled into impact, growth, hustle, excellence. Once that list exists, half your decisions make themselves, because anything that violates it is just off the table. You’ve pre-decided.

2. Make the autopilot visible. You can’t redesign a default you can’t see. This is why I journal — pen and paper, not an app. Writing is the open secret of self-awareness; it drags System 1’s quiet choices up into the light where System 2 can actually look at them. Most days it’s boring. That’s fine. Miss a day, forgive yourself, start again tomorrow. It’s a numbers game.

3. Work backwards. Pick the result you actually want, then reverse-engineer the steps. I use the SMART framework to nail down what (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and PACT to define how (purposeful, actionable, continuous, trackable). It sounds clinical; it’s really just refusing to leave your life to chance.

4. Build the routine that carries you. The least glamorous tool I own is also the most powerful: a humble routine. Whatever little I’ve achieved, I credit to deliberately bringing routine back into my life. Darren Hardy calls this the compound effect — small, almost invisible actions that look inconsequential in the moment but bend the whole trajectory of your life over time. The autopilot is going to run something. Routine just makes sure it runs the things you chose.

5. Keep score, and celebrate out loud. I kept a “happy memory box” — chits of paper with wins and good moments scribbled on them. On the hard days, that box was proof I was moving. Pull the reward closer to the effort; don’t wait years for the scoreboard to validate you.

The point isn’t a perfect plan

Here’s what I want you to take, more than any framework: living with intention isn’t a one-time event you complete and tick off. It’s a lifelong practice of catching yourself on autopilot and gently taking the wheel back. You’ll drift. You’ll relapse into the herd. So will I — I’m still travelling, not arrived.

But every time you make one choice consciously instead of letting it run, you’re voting for a life that’s actually yours. As Les Brown puts it, “If you don’t program yourself, life will program you.” That’s the whole choice, really. Author, or autopilot.

If you want the trackers, templates, and mental models I lean on to do this — the journaling prompts, the goal frameworks, the routines — they’re all in the resources, and the full version of this thinking lives in the book. You can also read more about why I write this stuff.

Ninety percent of your life is going to run on autopilot regardless. The only real question is whether you ever bothered to program the autopilot — or just let the herd do it for you.