The Mathematics of Intention

Lately, I’ve been noticing a quiet pattern.

Not a dramatic one.
Not a mystical one.
Just a repeatable one.

Again and again, life seems to deliver exactly what was asked for—even when the result surprises, disappoints, or confuses us. And more often than not, the surprise isn’t coming from the outcome. It’s coming from the original request.

Not wrong.
Just incomplete.

Covering the Ground

Years ago, Florence Scovel Shinn told a simple story about an affirmation one of her students used:

“I have a wonderful work, in a wonderful way,
I give wonderful service, for wonderful pay.”

She emphasized that the phrase worked because it covered the ground. Nothing was left vague. Nothing was implied and left to chance. The rhyme helped it sink in, yes—but the real strength was in its completeness.

She also shared a cautionary example. A woman once asked for work and received plenty of it—but was never paid. The request had been answered perfectly. The missing variable wasn’t effort. It was compensation.

Shinn wasn’t describing magic.
She was describing precision.

Intention as a Specification

Seen through a practical lens, intention behaves a lot like a specification.

Words define variables.
Omissions define risk.
Repetition reinforces alignment.

Reality, in this sense, behaves less like a judge and more like a compiler. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t negotiate. It simply resolves what it’s given.

If the input is underspecified, the output will still arrive. It just may not resemble what we meant.

That’s not punishment.
That’s math.

A General Business Pattern

You see this often in organizations.

A company sets out with admirable energy but fuzzy direction:

“We want growth.”
“We want adoption.”
“We want visibility.”

What’s missing are the constraints:

What kind of growth?
At what cost?
With what boundaries?
And for whose benefit?

The company may get exactly what it asked for—attention, traction, activity—while quietly losing leverage, focus, or sustainability. From the outside it can look like failure, but it’s usually not. It’s execution on an incomplete brief.

The system didn’t misunderstand.
It simply filled in the blanks.

The Same Pattern in an Individual Life

The same thing happens at the personal level.

Someone asks for:

“More responsibility” and gets stress.
“More opportunity” and gets busyness.
“More freedom” and gets instability.

Nothing went wrong.
The request just wasn’t fully specified.

Clarity isn’t about control. It’s about alignment. When effort, reward, boundaries, and values aren’t named together, they drift apart on their own.

The Cost of Ambiguity

Across domains, the pattern is consistent:

Work without clearly stated pay
Service without defined limits
Generosity without structure
Ambition without direction

In every case, the result isn’t failure. It’s exact execution of an incomplete request.

Undefined terms are still terms.

Why This Is Actually Good News

Here’s the hopeful part.

If outcomes are mathematical, they’re adjustable.
If results follow specifications, clarity becomes power—not force, not manipulation.

Being precise isn’t selfish.
It’s respectful.

It respects your time.
It respects other people.
It respects the system you’re engaging with.

Florence Scovel Shinn framed this as a spiritual truth, but it’s also an old, practical one: plenty is not excess. Plenty is balance. Compensation is not greed. It’s order.

Closing Thought

When results surprise us, it may be worth rereading the question we asked.

Not with judgment.
Not with regret.
Just with care.

Because more often than not, the system did exactly what it was told.

And next time, we can tell it a little better.

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Aaron Rose is a software engineer and technology writer at tech-reader.blog and aaronrose.blog.