It gets even more complex when interacting with others, listening to them talk about the things they want.
The magical priority list
This very quickly becomes a really thorny wicked question to answer and like Steve from Blue’s Clues, when I run into something like this, I reach for my handy dandy tool: a list.
Steve's Handy Dandy Notebook probably has a list inside of it
I love the list because it’s simple to create, very flexible, and yet incredibly powerful. Part of its power comes from its simplicity and flexibility but the other power of the list is the fact that one thing has to go top of another.
So I start making a list of things I want. And I mean, literally everything.
Follow Octavia Butler's advice in her novel Parable of the Sower (if you haven't read this book yet, seriously, go read it. for many reasons):
SOMETIMES NAMING A THING—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it.
Money, security, praise sure. But also things like love, family, friendship, not to starve, enjoyable hobbies, a meaningful life. Everything.
Then (and this is the deceptively difficult part) you rank everything from 1 to ♾️. You can’t bucket things into groups like “Critical, High, Medium, etc.” That’s a cop out and will only lead to confusion later on when you’re in the thick of it. Nothing is equal priority.
Lower on the list this is relatively easy, but as you get to the top, it’s gets really tough. Obviously I want all the things at the top of the list (that’s why they’re at the top) but imagine a scenario in the future when you need to make a decision and you have to trade one thing for the other, which will you give up?
Money or family?
Success or friendship?
Love and affection for children or your own health?
The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness.
One caveat that makes this process slightly easier: this list is not set in stone. It’s just where you are right now.
It’s an exercise in self-knowledge, not a manifesto.
You can change it as much as you want and you’re not being hypocritical or wishy-washy. It naturally shifts as you grow as a person and your context changes.
Everyone has a list
Here’s a secret – you’re already doing this. Everyone does it. All the time. We're wired for it.
It makes sense, people love talking about they want. We love talking about what other people want. We’re social animals, so having a well developed mental model of our own and other people’s desires helps us navigate the endlessly complex social web we find ourselves in.
So you and everyone you know, whether or not you’ve consciously done that exercise above, has a priority stack that goes from 1->∞. Every thing on that list is more or less important than every other thing.
But there’s a twist. These things fall into 3 categories:
What people say they want
What people know they want but don’t say they want
What people want but don’t know they want
When someone says they "want something" (success or a committed relationship or a better job or whatever), the implication is it's at the top of their list. “Success is the #1 thing in my priority stack. I will give up every other thing for success.”
But that’s almost certainly not true. There’s are things that are higher that they're not saying. Maybe they're irrelevant or implied ("everyone wants that!"). Maybe there are things higher up that they're not even aware of.
Their priority stack looks something like this:
a grossly over-simplified version of a priority stack
This is a toy version of course. But the general gist is right. The things someone knows they want but don't talk about tend to be higher up than the things they do talk about (I'll leave the exercise about why that's the case to you). And the things someone doesn't know that they want tend to be even higher up on the list.
The actual list is probably a little more jumbled depending on all sorts of things:
How self aware the person is
How close you are to the person
How honest the person is
Whether any of the things on the list are wrapped in shame or trauma
The context or situation
This is probably a closer depiction what someone’s list looks like (although still dramatically simplified):
a slightly less grossly over-simplified version of a priority stack
As an added twist, the thing they say they want may not be what they want, but the act of saying it is a means of getting what they want.
For example, someone might tell you that something like “excellence at their craft” is something they want. When in reality it may be number 4,230 on their list. However, impressing you or trying to fit in is up there in the teens. And they perceive that excellence is important to you. In that way, they’re expressing what they want by lying about what they want!
This rabbit hole has no bottom. And that’s ok. It’s not really important to understand what someone’s actual list is (are we ever truly knowable to others or ourselves is a real fun tangent for a different post).
The important thing to understand is simply this: this is how people think about and express their desires to themselves and others.
What does it mean to “want” something?
Our internal world is an idealized one. Every aspect of our internal world is within our (conscious and unconscious) control.
On the other hand, the external world is almost entirely outside of our control.
Wanting something expresses and explores the tension in this difference.
People may not be rational, but we are instinctively very good at optimizing for the outcomes we want.
So getting really good at understanding how you understand and express what you want will make it easier for you to hand off the things you want to your natural ability to optimize your life for those things.
Conversely it will also make it easier to let go of the things you might think or say you want, but don’t actually.
Visakan Veersamy, who tends to say things better in 10 words what I struggle to say in 1,000 puts it this way:
Now reverse it. In order to know what you want, look at what you're focusing your time and energy on.
That's not what you want? Great! Stop focusing your time and energy on it.
Finding it difficult to not focus your time and energy on it? Maybe there's something there you want.
Postscript: this is fun actually
This can feel like a draining exercise to do – bringing up all sorts of heavy ideas like “what have I been doing with my life?” “can I every really know anyone or myself?” “everyone is lying to each other constantly” and other such ponderances that lead to existential dread.
But it doesn’t have to be. There can be a lightness that comes with it. A realization that the limited prescribed paths that we thought we had to choose from are completely imaginary. The possibilities are, in fact, endless.
grains of sand on the beach, stars in the sky endless
It’s liberating to let go of things that you thought you wanted but didn’t really or that you did want at some point but no longer want or to discover an even more important desire at the heart of something you felt was really important.
