The Art of Wanting Wisely

Why Knowing What to Want Changes Everything

"True life mastery is more a function of knowing what to want than knowing how to get what you want." - Unknown

I used to be really good at getting things. Promotions, bigger houses, fancier cars, impressive titles. I was like a heat-seeking missile for achievement. The problem? I kept hitting targets that left me feeling empty.

It took me years to realize I'd mastered the wrong skill entirely.

The Dangerous Efficiency of Getting

We live in a culture obsessed with the "how." How to make more money. How to lose weight. How to network better. How to optimize everything from our morning routines to our retirement plans.

Don't get me wrong – these skills matter. But here's what I learned the hard way: becoming incredibly efficient at pursuing the wrong things is one of life's cruelest traps.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, "The first wealth is health." Yet how many of us sacrifice our well-being chasing wealth? We master the mechanics of accumulation while forgetting to ask: What actually makes life worth living?

The Compass vs. The Engine

Think of it this way. Your ability to execute – to get what you want – is your engine. It's powerful, it's useful, and our world rewards it generously. But knowing what to want? That's your compass.

An engine without a compass can take you very far in the wrong direction, very quickly.

I remember meeting a successful executive who'd climbed every corporate ladder, collected every achievement, checked every box society told him mattered. At 55, he sat in his corner office and realized he felt like a stranger to himself. He'd become a master of getting, but had never learned the art of wanting wisely.

What the Wise Ones Knew

The ancient Stoics understood this deeply. Marcus Aurelius, literally the most powerful man in his world, spent his private moments writing about the importance of wanting the right things: virtue over victory, character over conquest, meaning over accumulation.

"Very little is needed to make a happy life," he wrote. "It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."

Lao Tzu spoke of the power of knowing when you have enough. "He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." This isn't about settling for less – it's about recognizing what actually constitutes "enough" in the first place.

Even Dr. Seuss, in his wonderfully simple way, captured this truth: "Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You." The invitation? Want what aligns with who you actually are, not who the world says you should be.

The Questions That Change Everything

So how do we develop this compass? How do we learn to want wisely?

Start with these questions, but don't rush to answer them. Sit with them. Let them work on you:

What would I want if no one else would ever know about it? This cuts through the noise of external validation and social expectations.

When I'm 90 years old, what will I wish I had paid more attention to? Time has a way of clarifying what actually matters.

What activities make me lose track of time? These often point toward our deeper purposes and authentic interests.

If I could only accomplish three things in the rest of my life, what would they be? Constraints force clarity about priorities.

The Paradox of Wanting Less

Here's something beautiful that happens when you get better at knowing what to want: you often discover you want less than you thought. Not because you're settling, but because you're becoming more discerning.

When you know what you really want, the thousand other things competing for your attention lose their grip. The noise quiets. The path clears

As Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond, "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

He wasn't advocating poverty – he was celebrating the freedom that comes from wanting wisely.

Living the Questions

I'm not suggesting this is easy. In fact, learning what to want might be the hardest skill of all. It requires us to question everything we've been taught about success. It demands we listen to voices quieter than society's shoulds and musts.

But here's what I've learned: the people who seem most alive, most peaceful, most genuinely successful aren't necessarily the ones who got everything they wanted. They're the ones who learned to want what they got – or better yet, learned to want things worthy of a human life in the first place.

Your dreams aren't just about what you'll achieve. They're about who you'll become in the pursuit. Make sure you're becoming someone you'd want to meet.

The Invitation

So before you optimize another system or master another technique, pause. Ask yourself: Am I getting better at getting things, or am I getting better at knowing what's worth getting?

The world will teach you how to achieve almost anything. But only you can decide what's worth achieving.

That decision – that compass setting – might just be the most important skill you ever develop.

"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates taught us. Perhaps it's time we also learned that the unexamined want is not worth pursuing.

What would change in your life if you spent as much time learning what to want as you do learning how to get what you want? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Email me here.