So a little while back I did the perfect average day exercise that Frank Kern talks about. I spent a good couple of days thinking about it, and wrote out about 15 pages describing my ideal day.
What I wrote down really surprised me. It didn’t include:
- Partying in Ibiza.
- Climbing K2.
- Salsa dancing in Havana.
- Or any other of the things I have on my list of things to do.
Instead, it turned out to be a surprisingly chilled and laid-back day.
Which brings me to the title of this post: what we actually want.
The exercise triggered a bunch of random thought chains in my mind. All those things that I “want” to do, I actually don’t want to do – or at least not every day. In fact, most of the things that I thought I wanted to do were derived from hearing other people talk about them, or reading about them somewhere, or seeing them on random commercials on the less-than-4 hours of TV that I watch a month.
Most people delude themselves into thinking that they want things, when what they really want is experience. Kern gave the example of guys wanting Ferraris not because they want the cars themselves… but because they want to feel like James Bond. Or Justin Hemmes.
I’m going to take this one step further. You don’t even have to have the car to feel like James Bond – you can step outside your front door and feel that now. After all… emotional states and frames of mind are things we can change and alter within ourselves once we know how.
And what of the meaning of life? Well, after my suggestion that motivation is useless, some people pointed out the basic human urges of wanting to survive and reproduce. I was, of course, talking about the common complaint of many-a-office-worker of not being motivated enough to complete a task or project. But experience addresses the other side of the discussion, the question of “why am I doing this?”
Which is why I would add experience in as the third basic human urge. Wanting to experience is what causes people to dream, to fantasise, to want to go out and DO things in the world. It explains why everyone who has realised that happiness comes purely from within doesn’t automatically box themselves up in a monastery and enjoy existence until the end of their days (though that could be quite an experience in and of itself).
Is “experience” simply a fanciful smokescreen that hides motivation? Maybe. I still truly believe that needing to find the motivation to do things is a pointless exercise, and a waste of perfectly-good brain activity. If we simply know what we want to experience, and then go ahead and do things to get there… wouldn’t life be THAT much simpler? 
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