What Is the Law of Intentionality in Personal Growth?

Steve Peterson walked the plant floor every morning for three hours. I timed it once, because I wanted to learn from him. He talked to everybody. He looked at every machine. He came back around eleven with nothing written down and no decision made. Three hours of motion, zero decisions. The plant was no better at noon than it was at seven.

Steve was not lazy. He was on the wrong side of the Law of Intentionality, and for about fifteen years, so was I.

So what is the Law of Intentionality? It is the first of John C. Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and it says that growth does not just happen. You do not grow by putting in years. You grow when you decide to grow, pick one specific thing, and work on it on purpose, including on the days you do not feel like it. Time passing is not growth. Being busy is not growth. A decision plus a repeated action is growth, and not much else qualifies.

What the Law of Intentionality Actually Says

The Law of Intentionality states it in six words: growth doesn't just happen. That is the whole law. Maxwell put it first in the book on purpose, because the other fourteen laws have nothing to stand on until you believe this one.

I am a CPMM, a Certified Plant Maintenance Manager, which is a long way of saying I spent my career arguing with people about preventive maintenance. Here is what every maintenance manager knows. A pump does not get better with age. Left alone, it gets worse. The only thing that keeps it running is somebody writing a date on a calendar and doing the work on that date, whether or not the pump is making noise yet.

People work the same way. Nobody drifts into being better. We drift into being older. The Law of Intentionality is preventive maintenance on yourself, and the strange part of my career is that I built PM schedules for two hundred machines before I ever built one for me.

Why Growth Does Not Just Happen on Its Own

I worked with a man who had been at one plant for twenty-two years. He would tell you so in the first five minutes. He was proud of it and he had earned the right to be proud of it. But he could run one line. Only one. When that line went down for a rebuild, there was nowhere to put him.

He did not have twenty-two years of experience. He had one year of experience, twenty-two times. That is not an insult and it is not his fault alone. Nobody ever sat him down and told him that the years were not doing the work for him.

That is the quiet damage the Law of Intentionality warns you about. Experience accumulates whether you want it to or not. Growth does not. Growth requires a choice, and because nobody comes around asking you to make it, most of us never do. We wait for the promotion, the layoff, the scare at the doctor's office, the kid leaving for college. Then we grow, fast and badly, under pressure.

Intentional growth is just moving that same work earlier, when you get to choose the terms.

The Gaps That Keep People From Growing on Purpose

Maxwell names eight gaps in the chapter, and they are the most useful list in the book because you can usually spot yourself in one of them in about ten seconds.

• The Assumption Gap. I will grow automatically.
• The Knowledge Gap. I don't know how to grow, so why start.
• The Timing Gap. It's not the right season. I'll begin after things calm down.
• The Mistake Gap. If I try this I'll look foolish.
• The Perfection Gap. I need to find the best way before I take the first step.
• The Inspiration Gap. I don't feel like it today.
• The Comparison Gap. Everybody is further along than I am.
• The Expectation Gap. I thought this would be easier and faster than this.

I have personally lived in six of those eight. I spent most of my thirties parked in the Timing Gap, telling myself I would start reading and studying once things settled down at work. Things never settled down at work. That is what work is. I was forty-eight before I understood that waiting for a calm year is the same as deciding not to grow, except it feels responsible while you do it.

The Perfection Gap got me too, and it got me as a grown man who should have known better. I spent nine months researching which certification to pursue. Nine months. I could have been most of the way through the wrong one and learned more than I learned comparing brochures.

Pick the gap you are standing in. You do not have to fix your whole life. You have to name the one excuse you have been using, out loud, because excuses do not survive being said out loud to another human being.

How Do I Apply the Law of Intentionality This Week?

Here is how to apply the Law of Intentionality without rearranging your life. Five steps, and you can do all five before lunch.

One. Pick one thing, and make it small enough to be embarrassing. Not "become a better leader." Something like "learn to run a one-on-one that is not a status update." If you can't picture yourself doing it Tuesday, it is still too big.

Two. Name the time and the place. Not "daily." Say "6:40 in the morning, at the kitchen table, before anybody else is up." Growth that is not attached to a time and a place is a wish with good posture.

Three. Make it fifteen minutes. When I was twenty-three I had a mortgage, a baby and a full-time job, and fifteen minutes was all I had. Fifteen minutes a day for a year beats a two-hour Saturday you will quit in March.

Four. Tell one person. One. Your spouse, your buddy, the guy you eat lunch with. Not a social media post. Somebody who will say "how'd that go" on Thursday and mean it.

Five. Decide what you are giving up. This is the step everybody skips, and it is the reason the other four fail. Fifteen minutes has to come out of something. Name it today, in writing, or your old habits will quietly keep the time.

That is it. That is the whole system. There is no version of this where somebody hands you growth. There is only a decision, written down, attached to a clock.

Is the Law of Intentionality the Same as Setting Goals?

No, and the difference is why so many good people have a drawer full of abandoned goals.

A goal is an outcome you want. Intentionality is a decision you repeat. The goal is the destination. Intentionality is whether you actually get in the truck on a cold morning.

I own the proof. Years ago I bought a treadmill and put it in the basement, and I had a goal, a real one, written on an index card. For about five weeks I used it. After that it held laundry. It held laundry so well that my wife started folding on it. The goal was fine. The goal was never the problem. I had no time, no place, nobody asking, and nothing I had agreed to give up to make room for it.

Goals are about what you want. The Law of Intentionality is about what you have decided to do on a Tuesday when nobody is watching and nothing feels urgent. One of those is a feeling. The other one is a calendar.

What the Law of Intentionality Costs You

I am not going to tell you this part is free, because it is not, and I would rather you hear the price now than quit in six weeks wondering what went wrong.

It costs time that currently belongs to something you like. For me that was the first half hour of the evening, which used to be the television. It costs a little standing. When you start learning something new at fifty or sixty, you are the worst person in the room for a while, and somebody younger will explain something to you slowly. That stings, and you get over it.

It costs you the excuse. Once you have admitted that growth does not just happen, you can never again say the years went by. You chose. That is a heavier thing to carry, and it is also the only honest way to live.

And it costs other people something, which nobody mentions. If you take fifteen minutes in the morning, somebody else is covering that fifteen minutes. Go tell them. Ask instead of announcing. I got that wrong for about two years and it cost me more at home than it earned me at work.

Common Questions About the Law of Intentionality

Which of Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth is the Law of Intentionality?

It is the first one, chapter one. That order is not an accident. The other fourteen laws tell you how to grow, and all of them assume you have already decided to. If you skip this law, the rest of the book reads like good advice for somebody else.

How long before intentional growth shows results?

Longer than you want and sooner than you think. In my experience you will feel different in about three weeks, because doing what you said you would do changes how you see yourself before it changes your skills. Other people will notice something around the three-month mark, and they usually cannot name it. Real capability takes a year. The Expectation Gap is sitting right there waiting for you at week two, so decide now that week two is not a verdict.

Do I need a growth plan to follow the Law of Intentionality?

You need a decision first. A plan without a decision is a document. A decision without a plan still beats it, because the decision is what gets you moving on the bad days. Start with one thing, one time slot and one person who knows. Build the plan in month two, once you have proof you will actually show up.

What if my company will not pay for training or books?

Then you grow for free, which is how most of us did it. The library card still works. The person two benches over who is better than you at one specific thing will almost always explain it if you ask with respect and bring coffee. I learned more about reliability from a maintenance tech named Carl than from any class I ever sat in, and Carl cost me a cup of coffee and the humility to admit I did not know.

Reflection Questions

1. Which of the eight gaps are you standing in right now? Say the name of it out loud.
2. If somebody timed your last three hours the way I timed Steve's, what would they see you decide?
3. What is the one small thing, small enough to be embarrassing, that you would pick this week?
4. What time of day is it, and where are you sitting when you do it?
5. What are you giving up to make room, and who else pays for it?

The Bottom Line

Growth doesn't just happen. That is the Law of Intentionality, and it is the least inspiring and most useful sentence in the whole book.

Here is the one thing to do this week. Open whatever you use for a calendar, pick one fifteen-minute slot, and name it with the actual thing you are going to do in it. Not "growth." The real thing. Then tell one person it exists.

Steve Peterson retired a few years after I worked for him. Good man, well liked, three hours a day on the floor for twenty-some years. I think about him more than I expected to, because the difference between his career and the one he could have had was not effort. He had plenty of effort. It was intent.

So let me ask you the question I had to answer myself at forty-eight, and I would rather you answer it sooner than that. If nothing changes about how you spend your next twelve months, what will you be better at a year from now, and can you name it?

This ties back to The Law of Intentionality — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.