Every August, the small town of Knoxville, Iowa, transforms. The population of 7,300 swells to tens of thousands as sprint car racing fans, teams, and families pour in from all over the country (and some other countries) for the Knoxville Nationals: four days of the best racing on dirt anywhere in the world. I have attended many times (twice as a driver), and the energy of that week is electric.

In 2019, I almost didn't make it. It was a year after I had moved to Florida, and my closest friends had already assumed I wouldn't be there. When the pieces fell into place, allowing me to go, I decided not to say a word. I flew in and surprised them. Then my son came in from Tulsa. What started as a trip I nearly missed turned into one of my favorite weeks that whole year.

Then my phone data stopped working.

With that many people crowding the same cell towers in a town not built to handle that kind of load, social media was basically unreachable. The internet crawled. Notifications stopped. The outside world went quiet.

Everyone was just... there. After the races each night, people gathered, and there was laughter, music, and the kind of easy conversation that happens when nobody is half-distracted by a screen. We were paying attention to each other. We were present in a way that felt pure. The day after the final race, my phone signal came roaring back, and I remember thinking... wait. Was this week so good partly because we were all just living inside it?

If you have ever noticed how good life feels when you are fully present in something you love, you already know what intentional living feels like. Here are three simple ways to create more of that on purpose.

1. Your attention is always going somewhere.

The question is whether you are choosing where it goes or letting the world decide for you.

Think about the last time you picked up your phone out of habit, not intention. You were not looking for anything specific. You just... picked it up. Within minutes you had opinions about something you did not care about yesterday, felt vaguely unsettled about something happening three states away, and completely lost the thread of what you were doing before you reached for it.

That is operating on autopilot. Letting things that have nothing to do with your life pull you completely out of it.

I think about the people at the Knoxville Nationals that week. Nobody made a conscious decision to be more present. The cell towers did not have the bandwidth for that many devices, and a connection happened anyway. Just not with our phones. But here is the thing: we do not have to wait for our phones to stop working to experience that. We can choose it.

Ann Albers, a spiritual teacher whose weekly messages I have subscribed to for years, describes it beautifully. She talks about the world as a buffet where you get to pick and choose what you take in, physically, mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Most of us walk up to that buffet and reach for whatever catches our attention, whether it serves us or not. Intentional living means choosing what you put on your plate.

Your attention is your most valuable creative resource. Where it goes, your energy follows. And where your energy goes, your reality takes shape. That is just how focus works.

2. Joy is a practice, not an accident.

You know that feeling when you are so deep in something you love that you completely lose track of time? A conversation that goes for three hours without anyone noticing. A project that has you up at midnight not because you have to be but because you cannot stop. A week at a racetrack in Iowa, where four days feel like one long, perfect day.

That feeling is what happens when you place your attention on exactly what lights you up.

The problem is that most of us treat happiness like something that happens to us rather than something we create. We wait for the right circumstances, the right season, the right moment when everything settles down. And while we are waiting, we are giving our attention to everything except the things that actually light us up.

Here is a small but powerful reframe: joy is not a reward for when life becomes easier. It is a practice you build right now, inside the life you already have.

This does not have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as choosing a pizza that makes you happy. I love Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. Genuinely love it, and I have heard every argument against pineapple on pizza. Trust me. But here is my perspective: eat whatever makes your heart happy. If that is pineapple, wonderful. If it is pepperoni, also wonderful. The pineapple debate has never once made anyone's pizza taste better. What it has done is redirect perfectly good energy toward something that does not matter at all.

That is a small example, but the principle scales. Every time you choose your own joy on purpose, every time you pick the thing that genuinely lights you up instead of the thing that just fills the space, you are practicing intentional living. You are building the muscle.

3. The more you choose your own experience, the less anyone else's matters.

Here is the best unexpected side effect of intentional living, and it might be my favorite part.

When you start deliberately choosing where your attention goes, the noise loses its grip. You do not just feel better. You stop being as interested in what everyone else is doing. Not in a cold or disconnected way, in the most natural way imaginable. You are just too busy living your own life to spend much energy on anyone else's choices.

Think of it like a sliding scale. On one end, you are reactive: scrolling, absorbing, forming opinions about things that have nothing to do with your life. On the other end, you are so fully inside your own experience that the outside chatter barely registers. Most of us live somewhere in the middle, sliding back and forth depending on the day.

The goal is not to reach some perfect state of Zen detachment. The goal is just to slide a little further toward your own joy, more often. Because the further you slide, the less the pineapple-on-pizza debate even occurs to you. Somebody loves it, somebody hates it, and you are over here enjoying what you ordered.

As Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss.

That week in Knoxville, that is exactly what tens of thousands of people were doing. Their bliss just happened to be sprint car racing, good friends, and the kind of laughter that happens when you are where you want to be. The Nationals are always special, but that year the happiness was especially palpable. Nobody was arguing about anyone else's experience. We were all just in it: united at a once-a-year event.

You do not have to wait for your cell service to fail to get there.

The intentional life you want is not waiting for the distractions to stop. It is waiting for you to stop waiting.

So, this week, notice where your attention is going. Choose one thing (just one) that genuinely lights you up and give it your full presence. See what happens when you stop splitting yourself between your life and everyone else's.

What would you choose to focus on if you knew that your attention was actively building your reality?