Читать книгу The Most Important Question - Peep Vain - Страница 10

Everyone knows the Rolling Stones’ lyrics, You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need. I believe that. I also believe that you can get what you want most of the time. If you really, truly want it.

There’s the other great living philosopher, the British singer Joe Jackson, who, on his album, Steppin’ Out, sung, You can’t get what you want, ‘til you know what you want. I believe that, too.

We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what we want. Men talk about cars. Gosh, I’d sure like to have that new 42-cylinder Audi with the dual phenopagators. We talk with our spouses about what kind of house we’d like to have. Onehundred-and-fifty square meters in the city with enough money left over to fix up grandma’s place in the countryside. What kind of vacation we’d like to have. Seaside in summer and Thailand in winter. What kind of work we’d like to have. President of the company by age 35; retire to Spain. What kind of kids we’d like to have. Top of their classes in the very best schools.

We spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what we want. And yet I claim that this often does not give sufficient clarity and certainty.

So what do you really want? It appears to be a simple question. It’s similar to asking someone, “How’s it going?” There are the usual and expected answers like “just fine” and “good.” The only thing that we can conclude with a high degree of certainty is that the person responding is not suffering from a serious physical or psychological ailment. I am using the phrase “high degree of certainty,” because people are also pretty good at hiding their pain. I’m just fine, thank you very much...

But how would you answer the question: “What do you really want?” First, it would be necessary to better understand the question itself. What do you mean by that? What do I want from life? Do you mean what I imagine to be perfect? From work or in my personal life? Materially or emotionally?

It would be simple to avoid the question or turn it into a joke. To answer the question sincerely might require admitting you don’t know or you’re not sure. When people think about the question a little bit, they tend to answer that they’d like to really relax or find more time for themselves or to spend more time with their friends and family.

When I first started to play with this question and think deeper about it in the context of my work, I got rather mixed reactions. I made it the central question of one of my seminars. I had it on a poster on the wall and in the workbooks in great big letters. What do YOU really want?

Many people took the question seriously and made significant personal discoveries. Others did not appreciate this much, though. Even my friend and colleague, Urmas, was somewhat concerned. He felt that this question might easily insult some of our clients. He argued that the successful people who come to our seminars and invite us to work with their teams certainly knew what they wanted. And he wasn’t alone. Some clients actually did take offense, and it took some effort from my colleagues to smooth things over.

Of course I wasn’t aiming to insult anyone. Perhaps part of the problem was that I simplified the question too much. But since then I’ve done some more thinking about it and my conclusion is the same – too often we do not know what we really want. We don’t know what we want exactly. Or what’s most important right now. Or what we hope to feel and experience should we actually get what we want.