Wants vs. Shoulds: A Learning Journey
As I’ve done research for Sustainable Ambition, a core principle continues to become more clear and deepen—to listen to your personal wants more than societal should’s.
I was listening to a podcast yesterday evening while out for a walk, and suddenly I heard this perfect phrase from the book, “No Man is an Island,” by Thomas Merton: “Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
Or as David Brown said in Episode #9 of The Sustainable Ambition Podcast, “There really isn’t a sustainable option other than to be yourself,” or as Lisa Lewis Miller said in Episode #11, “There’s an interesting paradox... You are the only person who can know what you want. So, this tension between feeling like we don’t know, but also being the only definitive source of information to answer this question is a really interesting place to be.”
So I encourage you to set goals and make choices for your life and career in alignment with what you want. Now that takes knowing what you want. And that does take some work. And realistically, we need to dance with societal norms, but my suggestion is not to let them call the shots. At some point, making decisions looking outward catches up with you, and you start to wonder whose life you are leading.
And, let it be a learning journey. I’ve started to realize looking at my own path, based on reading and research, and working with my coaching clients that societal guidance often does us a disservice. For example, take what I’m now dubbing the passion paralysis or the passion paradox—that searching for a passion doesn’t set the right goal, because many of us get in a trap of searching, searching, searching for that one singular passion to call our calling. Or, you may know your passion and turn it into your work only to find that it no longer is a passion as a job. It’s also unrealistic to expect that we should be able to identify our one and only path when we’re 16-20 years old. As Peter Drucker said, “But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.”
The reality is for many of us it takes time to get to know ourselves. In truth, it may be why we lean on the should’s early in our careers, because it takes having experiences over time to unpack what we want from our work. That’s why it’s important to pay attention all the time. Because our satisfaction with our work and the structures we need from it change over time.
Our careers are often learning journeys—what am I interested in now? What have I learned about myself? What am I made for now? How do I want to grow? What kind of job do I need right now to support my life? What’s the next step in my career adventure? And we can only make one good decision at a time, as Mala Singh reminded us in Episode #15.
So, I encourage you to stay in conversation with yourself. Focus on learning about what you want and take the pressure off by recognizing that uncovering our path is just that, a discovery and a journey.
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