My whole life, I’ve had big dreams. From the time I was a young boy, I dreamed of a life full of adventure, travel, success, and connection. And while dreams don’t always come to fruition exactly as imagined, having the intention toward what you want, what you need, and what you’re working toward, is always the first step. Just never the only one.
From a very young age there was a long list of things I wanted to do. The first was a dream of becoming a figure skater. I told my parents, they listened, and at around five years old they put me on the ice to see if I actually liked it, or had any natural talent. It turned out I loved it, and from the very beginning I had some skill. So I kept at it.
But here’s the thing — the intention of wanting to be a skater wasn’t enough to actually get anywhere. It was the action that followed. Those first few months showed me quickly that it would take years of real work to even get good. So from five to ten years old, I skated any time and any day that I could. I trained, I practiced, I fell down more times than I can count, and I got back up every single time. By the time I was eleven, I had become quite good. I competed, I skated all over my province, and I won a fair number of medals along the way. I didn’t become a Canadian champion, or even close to that, but I became an exceptional skater, and I did it because the intention was just the spark. The action was everything that came after.
The same pattern has played out across my entire life. When I was in my twenties I dreamed of being a singer. With that intention in hand, I found a way to make it real. I learned to read music, wrote lyrics, and eventually stepped into a studio to record my first single as a solo artist. More followed. Some even found a degree of success.
When I was changing careers in my late twenties, I had an idea to start a magazine. The intention was there, but I had no idea where to start or what was actually involved. So I spent months doing research, and then years building. I launched it, and even then it took another three years of consistent action and hard work to make it into something real. That magazine became an international hit, opened doors I couldn’t have imagined, allowed me to travel and meet extraordinary people, and fifteen years later, it’s still going.
Intention sparked the idea. Action, determination, perseverance, and hard work made it happen. In every single one of these cases and in every endeavour that has followed, the two have become so closely linked for me that I can no longer really separate them. For me personally, intention without action is just a nice thought that never goes anywhere. And over the years, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people operate differently, driven more by intention than by the action required to bring it to life. That’s not right or wrong, good or bad. It’s just different from how I’m wired.
Think about it this way. A significant percentage of jobs listed online never end up hiring anyone. Sometimes there’s no budget after all. Sometimes the role gets filled internally. But for a portion of those listings, the act of posting the job. The intention of wanting to hire someone, was enough. The follow-through of actually sorting through applications, interviewing candidates, and making a decision never came. The intention was satisfied by the gesture alone.
I see the same thing play out on social media, and after fifteen years of working in this space, I’ve seen it more times than I can count. People will say they support you, that they’re part of your community, that they want connection and belonging in their lives, and when it comes time to actually take a step, they often don’t. Not because they’re bad people or have bad intentions. But because expressing the desire was enough for them. The action that would actually bring the thing they say they want into their life never follows.
It’s one of the more genuinely fascinating patterns I’ve observed at scale. People will tell you they’re lonely, that they’re searching for their people, that they crave real community. And then when you build exactly that and hold the door open, most of them don’t walk through. Not because the thing isn’t right for them. But because wanting it, and saying they want it, satisfied something enough that the actual step never felt urgent.
I’ve had to make peace with this, because if I hadn’t I’d have driven myself mad by now. The gap between what people say they want and what they’re willing to actually do to get it is wider than most of us would like to admit. And it’s not unique to social media or to any particular group of people. It’s just a very human pattern that modern life has made easier to fall into, because there are now so many ways to perform the feeling of doing something without ever having to do the thing itself.
Liking a post about healthy eating isn’t the same as changing what you eat. Commenting on someone’s business announcement isn’t the same as supporting the business. Telling someone you care about them isn’t the same as showing up when it matters. And wanting a different life and saying you want one, imagining it, even telling people about it, isn’t the same as taking the first uncomfortable step toward building one.
I say all of this not to judge anyone, because genuinely, I don’t. I’ve simply spent enough time watching the gap between intention and action to know that it’s real, it’s common, and it’s worth naming honestly. Because I think a lot of us fool ourselves into believing that wanting something hard enough is a form of working toward it. It isn’t. Wanting is the beginning. It’s a necessary beginning. But it is only ever the beginning.
The people I admire most in life — the ones who have built things, changed things, rebuilt themselves after everything fell apart — aren’t people who wanted it more than anyone else. They’re people who kept showing up after the wanting, on the days when the action felt pointless, when nobody was watching, when the results weren’t there yet. They did the thing. Repeatedly. Without guarantee.
That’s what separates the life you imagine from the life you actually live.
So the next time you find yourself holding an intention for something — a goal, a change, a connection, a version of your life that feels just out of reach — ask yourself honestly: is this an intention for good feelings, or is this something I actually want enough to act on? Because knowing the difference matters. It’s the whole thing, really.
Wanting is easy. Showing up is the hard part. And showing up is the only part that counts.