Upton Sinclair was an author running for governor of California. His greatest asset was his pen, and he knew he could communicate with the public in a way few candidates could. So he used it. Before the election, he published a short book titled I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty, written in the past tense, describing the brilliant policies he had already enacted as governor of an office he had not yet won.

The effect was immediate, and it had little to do with voters. As his friend Carey McWilliams observed when the campaign began to fall apart, “Upton not only realized that he would be defeated but seemed somehow to have lost interest in the campaign. In that vivid imagination of his, he had already acted out the part of ‘I, Governor of California’... so why bother to enact it in real life?”

The book became a best seller. The campaign became a failure. Sinclair lost by more than ten percentage points. His talk had moved ahead of his campaign, and the will to bridge the gap collapsed.

Niyyah, intention, is one of the most examined concepts in Islamic ethics. The foundational hadith is clear: “Actions are by intentions.”

What receives less attention is the failure mode: an intention strong enough to feel real, yet never converted into action. The intention is there. The feeling of purpose is genuine. Yet nothing gets done, because the niyyah has already been satisfied at the level of imagination.

This is what ghurur produces. A person repeatedly announces a project, describes it in vivid detail, receives validation for it, and explains the vision to multiple audiences. In doing so, they feed the niyyah enough satisfaction that the internal drive to act begins to weaken. The gap between intention and execution feels smaller than it really is, because announcing it felt like a form of doing it.

The Islamic corrective is precise: niyyah must remain connected to amal. Intention without action is not intention in any meaningful sense. It is the performance of intention. And the more elaborately it is performed, the more completely it replaces the real thing.

Emily Gould had a six figure book deal and a stalled novel. For a year, she did everything except write it. She scrolled, posted, and curated. Later, she wrote, “This didn’t earn me any money, but it felt like work. I justified my habits to myself in various ways. I was building my brand. Blogging was a creative act... It was also the only creative thing I was doing.”

That last line carries the real weight: It was also the only creative thing I was doing.

All the activity surrounding the novel, talking about writing, performing a writerly identity, staying visible in creative spaces online, provided enough of what the novel itself was supposed to provide that the novel kept getting deferred.

Ryan Holiday puts the mechanism plainly: “At the beginning of any path, we’re excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly.”

That is the trap. The talking is not always laziness. Often it is fear management. And when fear management works well enough, the actual work starts to feel unnecessary.

The research Holiday cites makes the mechanism even clearer. After a certain point, the mind begins to confuse goal visualization with actual progress. Talking about a difficult task creates a feeling of nearness to it. And when the work becomes difficult, that feeling of nearness becomes an exit: I already gave this my best effort.

So the person abandons something they barely began, while sincerely feeling that they tried.

This is not just a character flaw. It is a structural feature of the mind. The harder the task, the more the mind is tempted to substitute description for execution. And the more uncertain the outcome, the more attractive the imagined version becomes, because in the imagined version, the result is already secured.

Sinclair’s book was written in the past tense. In his imagination, the work was already finished before a single vote had been cast. By the time the real campaign demanded effort, stress, uncertainty, and accountability, he had already lived through the satisfying version. The real thing had nothing left to offer that the imaginary one had not already delivered.

The Islamic tradition does not answer ghurur with a simple rule of silence. It answers it by reorienting the inner account.

The practice of muhasabah, honest self accounting, includes examining not only what was done, but also what was spoken about without being done. The real question is not, Did I have good intentions? The real question is, Did the intention produce anything?

The Prophet ﷺ and his companions were marked by doing before speaking. Action came first. The word followed. This was not just good communication strategy. It was a way of keeping niyyah clean, focused, and undiffused by repeated performance.

The gap Sinclair could not bridge was not a gap in talent or even strategy. It was a gap between the imagined version, already completed, and the real version, which required him to endure defeat, uncertainty, stress, and accountability. The imagined version demanded none of that.

So the imagined version won.

Why do people announce goals before achieving them?
Because the announcement provides immediate emotional reward. Excitement and anxiety show up together at the beginning of difficult work, and publicizing the goal can feel like progress. The Islamic concept of ghurur names this clearly: a person becomes deceived by their own narrative and begins treating the announcement as part of the achievement.

What does the research say about announcing goals?
It suggests that beyond a certain point, the mind can confuse talking about a goal with moving toward it. That lowers urgency. Then, once the real work becomes difficult, a person may feel as though they have already invested real effort, making it easier to quit.

What is ghurur in Islam?
Ghurur is self deception, being misled by your own inner story about where you really stand. In this context, it means mistaking intention for action, or confusing the imagined version of something with the real one.

What is the Islamic view on niyyah?
The Prophet ﷺ said, “Actions are by intentions.” The tradition treats niyyah as the inward orientation that gives an act its worth. But it must remain tied to amal. Repeatedly performed intention without action is not strong intention. It is theatrical intention.

How is talking about work different from seeking advice or accountability?
The difference is whether the conversation emerges from real work or replaces it. Seeking feedback on an actual problem usually requires that something real already exists. Announcing ambitions or performing an identity gives satisfaction without requiring progress.

How can someone stop falling into the Sinclair trap?
By practicing muhasabah and auditing not only what they did, but what they spoke about without doing. The discipline is simple and hard: let the work come before the word. Do not announce what does not yet exist.