How to Get What You Want

To get what you want, step one is to know what you want.

Sounds easy, but it’s not.

Often, what we think we want turns out not to be what we want at all.

We’ve been taught to alter our desires to align with what is reasonable and realistic for our circumstances. So we spend our lives building houses we don’t actually want to live in, and then wondering how we ended up living in these houses we despise.

Then, to contend with the frustration and disappointement we’ve unwittingly created for ourselves, we develop compulsions designed to protect and distance us from those uncomfortable feelings. To “take the edge off” the central misalignment at the heart of our discomfort: the fact that we still aren’t going toward what we want, we are simply trying (and ultimately failing) to move away from what we don’t want.

If you are exhausted and sleep-deprived from overworking, you may feel like all you want to do is to stay in bed for a week straight. But that’s only addressing the symptom, not the root cause. And after a couple of days in bed, you’d probably start to feel pretty bored and restless, so to stave off your boredom, you’d start binging Netflix.

So now you’re treating the side effects of your self-medication. But none of this is getting at the actual root cause or moving you closer to what you actually want.

To know what we want so that we can get what we want, we need to be able to differentiate between a desire and a compulsion.