Wise Tip #1: Ask “What Do I Want . . . ?”
When you don’t know which way to go, ask yourself a “What
do I . . . ?” question.
When you are working in scientific research and you feel
stumped, ask, “What am I trying to find out?” When you are writ-
ing an essay or an advertisement and you just find yourself staring
at the blank wall, ask, “What do I want to say?” When you are
running around in circles doing a million things and cannot decide
what to do next, ask, “What am I trying to do?”
Guidance
often seems to appear as if by magic when you step back and
ask yourself the basic “What do I . . . ?” question.
The aim of this article is to determine which desires are most important
for you, or for an institution with which you are working. The following
are useful tactics:
• Assess your wants systematically, devoting a block of time to the
task, rather than just doing it hit-or-miss.
• Write down your thoughts, rather than just mulling them in your
mind. Writing with a computer is even better than using paper and
pencil because the computer makes it easy to revise the items on
your list.
• Do not exclude from your original list those desires that you think
are presently unattainable. There will be time later on to put your
wants into their proper perspective.
• Begin the exploration of your mind with pen (or computer) in hand.
You might first try the straightforward approach of writing down
your desires in a list, then attaching a priority weight to each desire
—say, a number between 1 and 5. Or, you can try imagining
some stories that illustrate a conflict between two or more desires,
and ask yourself how you would like the story to end; from that
story you can draw a conclusion about your priorities. Or you can
get outside of your own perspective and pretend you are someone
else, and then ask what you (the other person) think your own desires
are.
Exercises for school kids under the label “values clarification” purport
to help young people sort out the importance of (say) animal rights
versus having soft drinks in aluminum containers. Or you may be able
to dream up another way of grilling yourself about what is important to
you. It can be very instructive to look at the choices you actually make,
because they may reveal that a desire is stronger or weaker than you are
willing to admit to yourself. Done one way or another, this activity adds
up to a process of serious introspection.
It’s a Tough Job. Give It Your Best Time and Energy
The process of investigating your wants requires effort. It also requires
the courage to see yourself as you are, to admit to yourself truths that
may not seem flattering. For example, you may come to realize that you
really like very much to take life quite easy, to sit by the sea and look
into the distance, though you have always believed that this is not an
acceptable way of life. Put this desire on your list. Later you can sort out
the conflict between that desire and the desire to live in ways that are
more acceptable to the community, or according to some of your other
values about hard work and contribution to society.
Making a study of one’s wants also can be painful. It hurts to come
face to face with the hard truth that some of your strongest desires are
incompatible with each other and therefore you must forgo some of them;
few people are able to have both the freedom of a bachelor and the
satisfactions of married life. (Forcing recognition of the inevitable
tradeoffs among desires is one of the jobs of the economist when discussing
public policy, and it is one reason that economists are not popular
with politicians. Who wants to hear that you can’t have your cake
and eat it too—you can’t have a high level of government spending for
social programs and also a low level of taxes, for example—when you
wish to make the electorate happy with promises of being able to do
both?)
Wise Tip #2: Give Life Search Your Best Time and Energy
The subhead to this section is “It’s a Tough Job. Give It Your
Best Time and Energy.” Here we’re talking about sorting out your
wants, but there is a general lesson here, too: Often we leave our
studies in self-knowledge for our after-hours time, when we are
tired and therefore not very productive. As I found out in conquering
my depression in 1975
often the solutions come only when you commit yourself to working
on the job of remaking yourself just as you commit yourself to
other tough jobs.
Prepare your materials and schedule, get a good night’s sleep,
and tackle the work fresh in the morning—day after day, if necessary.
Don’t fool yourself that other work is more important and therefore
deserves your prime time. Figuring out your life deserves your prime
time and strength, and until you devote yourself to the job, you may
continue to suffer from the lack of knowledge you seek and need.
Analyzing other people’s wants with them can be valuable practice
for sorting out your own wants. With the benefit of the objectivity that is
possible when discussing someone else’s problems, you can learn about
the confusions from which we all suffer in sorting out our desires, and
understand how we all resort to a variety of mental gimmicks (such as
procrastination) in order to avoid the work and pain associated with the
process.
The Human Condition: Dealing With the Conflicts
of Wants
After preparing your list, inspect it for incompatibilities among your
wants—between leisure and making a lot of money, perhaps, or between
deepening your personal education and getting ahead on the job. When
you ask and answer which wants are more important to you, you have
information to improve your priorities.
We can form and indulge our preferences for entertainment, say, and
our tastes for types of restaurants or when to sleep and wake, solely with
regard to ourselves and those close to us. But the choice of one’s basic
values must also depend upon the human consensus, because values are
(by definition) intertwined with our basic beliefs about humanity and
human life. Some values are inherently better in a moral sense than are
others, just as values should have a higher priority than tastes and other
preferences, according to one’s hierarchy of beliefs. (This is analogous
to the hierarchy of laws in a society, starting at the bottom with local
ordinances—about, say, garbage collection—and proceeding upward to
the overarching Constitution and its concern with the most fundamental
issues of the governance of society.)
Though you ought to give some weight to the values of other persons
and groups when choosing your own values, there are still major choices
to be made, because there always is far from perfect consensus in any
community. Some criteria may be useful in making these choices. I suggest
the following criteria that reflect my own values:
• The extent of universality throughout humanity, as the value for the
preservation of life and the sanction against murder are universal.
Universality is connected to the morality attributed to a value.
• The enduring quality of those values that persist throughout human
history. Endurance also is a hallmark of those values that are widely
considered to represent morality.
• The breadth of application of values, that is, some (but not equal)
concern for the larger group as well as for the people close to you.
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