Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is a hack for knowing what you should set your sights on.
Gun for your most satisfying desire.
This is my advice to you. This is my advice for people trying to figure out what they want.
It’s actually one of the hardest things to figure out in this journey: what do I really want?
It sounds like it should be an easy question.
But so many of us having been living small – so many of us haven’t given ourselves permission to be happy for so long – that it can be a very difficult thing to figure out.
To know what YOU really want, you have to know what YOU are really about.
If you’re not connected with yourself and at peace with yourself, this can be hard to know.
And often when people start to think about what they want, they get a lot of what I call ‘decoy’ desires – these are desires that seem authentic enough, but when you scratch the surface, they’re not really yours. They don’t really belong to you.
I’m thinking about the person who says they want to be a doctor, when the only reason they want to be a doctor is impress and satisfy their parents.
Or I’m thinking about the person who says they want to go on a kite-surfing holiday, when they’re only saying that because it sounds glamourous and adventurous, when the truth is that they burn easily and would much rather be curled up in the mountains with a decent red and a good book.
Or I’m thinking about the woman who says she wants a Tesla, when she really gets much more enjoyment out of a powerful SUV. (That was me!)
So we’ve got to get past these decoy desires to discover and name what it is we truly want.
The next trap we face then is the allure of short term thrills.
Imagine a genie pops out of a bottle and offers to grant you a wish. What happens if you go for a piece of the most epic chocolate cake ever made? What if you go for a night out with Brad Pitt? What if you go for front row seats at the State of Origin.
All great wishes. All authentic wishes. But you wake up the next day and then where are you (assuming you’re not in the arms of Brad Pitt)?
No, what I think we have to go for is the most satisfying desire we can find.
This probably takes a bit of trial and error. A bit of data sampling. We need to experiment and see how different things land.
But everyone has something, that when they land it, they get a deep feeling of satisfaction, that burns like a lovely warm fire in their belly.
This is the feeling to go for. Because this endures. This gives our life a richness – the sense that this is a life well-lived.
It hits us deep and shapes who we are and how we experience ourselves.
Now I can’t tell you what that is.
For me, it’s getting up in front of a bunch of people and sharing knowledge that I know is going to change people’s lives.
I can’t tell you why, but this just gets me. It leaves me deeply satisfied and contented. The glow lasts for days.
But it could be anything. Surfing, painting, caring for your children, whatever.
Only you can know.
But if you want to be happy – if you want to live a good life – then you have to gun for the most satisfying desire you can.
Once you land this – once you figure out what it is – then the rest is easy.
It’s just logistics really.
DB.