Short and sweet: must happen will always beat should happen.
Have you ever sat back and watched a friend talk about doing something for an extended period of time? Like launching their own studio for three straight years? Every conversation circled back to it: the market research they'd done, the logo concepts they loved, the spreadsheet of potential clients. Then one day the talk stopped. It wasn’t because they gave up. Turns out they were too busy running a studio. Sometimes talk is just that, idle chit chat, gossip, hot air, words that ultimately amount to nothing. But under the right circumstances, that idea suddenly actually needs to happen. A fun to think of “should,” becomes a mission, a must. Your friend stopped hoping and started treating it like it had to.
Most people live in "should." Should happen, it’d be nice, some day maybe. Hoping it happens isn’t manifestation and very few people ever flip that switch to something imperative. Making a thought into something that became critical to their being.
When something merely should happen, it competes for your attention along with everything else that should also happen: the gym, your hobbies, your inbox, the relationship you keep meaning to invest in. Should items get mentally filed away. It’s like that CV they’re keeping on file for future reference. The things that get done are the ones that shout loudest, are most urgent or most of the time just what are easy. Short term wins accumulate over whatever matters most long-term.
"Must," on the other hand, does not negotiate. When you genuinely believe something must happen, it stops being an option, much less an option among many. Must tasks function like a constraint you need to resolve. You don't sit there asking yourself "do I have time for this." You figure out "how do I make time for this." This unconsciously changes what you notice, who you talk to, and what you're willing to sacrifice to make it happen.
Most ambitious goals die on the drawing board, out of public view. Nobody announces they're giving up on the book they’ve always wanted to write or their funky business idea. They just let it slide. You may still dream of it from time to time but the idea is dead and you may as well bury it properly and move on.
Originality Is Overrated
I try to write about things that are common sense. That means this isn't a new insight. Entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists have been describing some version of it for as long as we've had language to describe ambition. Military strategists talk about burning the boats so retreat isn't an option. Athletes call it visualization and pair it with non-negotiable training blocks.
The same mechanism ties these different descriptions together. To get to must, you need to remove the option of not doing. The people who actually pull off difficult, uncertain goals tend to describe a moment where the goal stopped being aspirational and became something baked into how they organized their days rather than something they hoped to get to.
Turning "Should" Into "Must"
Belief will help you a lot here, however, on its own it won’t move anything. “I believe I can move mountains” is not the same as the guy in India who actually did that with a hammer and a chisel. Belief needs to turn into structure to break free from your head and turn into real world actions. Here's what you can do.
1. Make the cost of inaction concrete
Vague goals stay as should. Instead of "I should write more," calculate what not writing costs you over a year: missed opportunities, the version of you that never gets discovered, the difference between zero and even modest output. You need to create an urgency around your goal that vague intentions never will.
2. Make yourself accountable
I’ve said this before in a number of other contexts. Tell someone who will actually check in and kick you up the butt if you are not making progress. This can do more than any amount of private resolve. In combination, it’s unstoppable. That person must be trustworthy; if you fail, they won’t humiliate you. They might give you a gentle ribbing but they will understand that you failed because you tried. A second source of accountability means you are not relying on willpower alone, so on the days when your energy is low, you still have something pulling you forward.
3. Remove cognitive overheads
Decide once to do your task, to make it happen. Set time aside to do the things required. Don’t try to decide every morning whether or not you'll work on it. This one decision removes hundreds of future decisions where you could talk yourself out of it. All of those decisions can only add to any existing fatigue.
4. Once it’s in your schedule, attach the goal to your identity
"I'm trying to exercise a couple of times a week" is fragile. "I'm someone who trains" is more robust. Identity-based commitments survive bad weeks better than schedule-based ones. You can still miss a session but that doesn't threaten who you are, just what you did (or didn’t do) today.
5. Deadlines and consequences!
When you have nothing to lose, a deadline is just a suggestion. Think about why you get things done to sometimes unreasonable deadlines for your job. You have something to lose! Set a deadline and pair that with something that will cost you if you don't follow through. Donate to a cause you dislike, have a bot post to your social media if you miss your deadline, have a launch date you've already sold pre-order or paying customers on.
Confidence Doesn’t Enter The Equation
Believing something must happen isn't about confidence. The people who execute best on "must" goals often aren't the most confident in the room, they're the ones who've simply removed confidence from the equation entirely.
Confidence is a feeling. Like motivation, confidence can fluctuate. If your follow-through depends on either, you'll have inconsistent output. Everyone has bad days. The "must" mindset works precisely because it doesn't ask you to feel ready or capable. It asks you to act regardless of how you feel, because the outcome has been decided as necessary, not as something contingent on your mood. Paradoxically, the confidence usually shows up after the action, not before it. Waiting for it first is exactly backwards.
And if you are having that bad day, making a commitment to do even one small thing to edge you closer to the goal is worth it. You might find that the “just 5 minutes” you said you would do turned into 45 minutes and that you made progress!
Where This Leaves You
"Should" is a wish. "Must" is a decision that's already been made. This isn't whether you believe something must happen. Most of us already believe that about at least one thing in our lives. The real question is what you're going to build around that belief so it survives contact with even the shittiest Tuesday.
What's the one thing in your life that's still sitting in "should" when you know, deep down, it belongs in "must"? Tell me what it is and I’ll hold you to it.
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