The Battle of “Want” vs. “Should”
Want never goes away.
The people who actually follow through aren't more disciplined than the rest of us. They just planned for the moment when want would tempt them away from should. Everyone else assumed future-them would handle it. Future-them rarely does.
That idea hit me hard when I came across this quote from David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart: "Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don't have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted."
He's writing about personal behavior, but I couldn't stop thinking about how perfectly it describes what happens to strategies inside organizations.
Every strategy is a list of shoulds (or ideally wills). We should enter this new market. We should fix our customer experience. We should build this capability. And when the plan gets built, it looks completely achievable. Leadership is aligned, and the team is energized.
Then the daily work hits. The inbox fills. A customer escalation lands. Someone pulls a key person onto an urgent project. The want of keeping the business running doesn't pause for the should of building the future. It just keeps coming. And because nobody planned for that tension, the strategy loses ground — one reasonable, defensible decision at a time.
McRaney's insight reframes the whole problem. Execution doesn't fail because people don't care about the strategy. It fails because caring isn't a plan. You have to anticipate the pull of want before it arrives and build structures that make should the easier choice.
That's what good execution systems actually do. Protected time for strategic work. Clear priorities so teams know what to defend when pressure hits. Regular checkpoints that surface what's getting in the way before it's too late to course-correct. The Six Cs system I write about is essentially designed to give the should a fighting chance against the want.
The organizations that execute well aren't filled with unusually disciplined people. They've just built an environment where the should can hold its ground.
Future-you is going to be tempted. Plan for it.
