Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler explore one of the most foundational distinctions in the Art of Accomplishment framework: the difference between wants and shoulds. Joe defines “should” as a mechanism of shame — energetically oppressive, intellectually controlling, emotionally rigid, and neurologically a threat. He traces this insight to a personal experiment at age 26 where he wrote down everything he didn’t want to admit about himself, then found months later that most items had changed through awareness alone — except those carrying a heavy “should.”
The episode distinguishes wants from cravings. Wants are somatically expansive, intellectually empowering impulses that move naturally through us — the same force that drives a toddler to walk and a child to learn. Cravings are wants with attachment — the painful fixation on getting to the goal rather than feeling the desire itself. Joe argues that fully feeling a want without trying to achieve it is one of the closest experiences to love, connecting to the Sufi poetic tradition of longing as sacred.
Applied to business, Joe explains that intention (a clear goal) is essential, but the attitude toward that goal matters enormously. Every successful CEO he knows was attached not to money itself but to something beyond it — being the best, reducing carbon, creating great cultures. Holding goals with want rather than should creates flexibility, enjoyment, and efficiency. He shares his own pivotal moment: realizing his drive to make money in venture capital was actually an old childhood should about pleasing his father, and that his real want was to create great workplace cultures.
Key Concepts
- Should is a mechanism of shame that locks bad habits in place
- Craving and wanting are fundamentally different experiences
- Wanting is a form of aliveness close to love
- Goals generate questions, not destinations
- Should creates either rebellion or submission
- Awareness changes what shoulds cannot
- Intention without attachment is the most effective approach to goals
Key Quotes
“Should is a mechanism of shame… energetically it’s oppressive, intellectually it’s control-based, emotionally it’s rigidity, and neurologically it’s a threat.”
“You can either do the kind of work where you after 10 years can describe everything that’s wrong with you but nothing’s changed, or you can do the work that you say what the fuck just happened.”
“The want is just that very simple impulse that’s moving us… it moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones. It is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line. If we allow it, it’ll take us all the way to freedom.”
“Being attached to succeeding is absolutely a fine way to succeed. It’s not the most efficient way to succeed. It is not the most enjoyable way to succeed.”
“If you fully feel that experience, it turns deeply into a loving expansive experience… it is one of the closest feelings to love, to allow a desire deeply inside of you.”
“Every time you’re using the should, what’s happening is that you are either creating your own internal rebellion… or you’re creating a disempowered situation inside yourself.”
Transcript
Is just that very simple impulse that’s moving us that moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones it is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line if we allow it it’ll take us all the way to freedom welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson thank you if you look at all the bad habits that you’ve been trying to stop for a decade you’ll find they all have one thing in common they’re all things you’re telling yourself you should stop doing the same is likely true for the things you tell yourself you should be doing more of finishing a project going to the gym calling your mom what if thinking you should is what keeps you stuck and what if getting in touch with your wants in a deep way is the quickest way to get unstuck let’s get to the bottom of this so Joe I would think this is pretty obvious but you usually have a unique definition of things so what exactly do you mean by should yeah should is a a mechanism of Shame it’s it is there’s a saying that says the shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place so should is like a a really bad management technique it’s uh it’s energetically it’s oppressive intellectually it’s control based emotionally it’s rigidity and neurologically it’s a threat right so if you say to somebody you should really do that there is a threat in that and is what’s interesting is that same energy really doesn’t happen in certain cultures um when you see particularly like more indigenous cultures that I’ve been a part of and seen that there’s like a that whole like should telling people thing just doesn’t happen at least energetically it doesn’t happen and when I mean energetically I don’t mean energetically like in a spiritual New Age way I just literally mean like the energy in which you are talking to the person yeah so that that’s what I think it is and you’re right they are the things that keep your bad habits in place should so just really ineffective and I’ll tell you the story where I learned this I was like 26 years old and uh I decided I was going to be like brutally honest with myself and so I wrote down a list of everything about myself that I that I didn’t want to admit to about myself and then I folded it away and I put it away and I found it like six months maybe a year later and I went through the list and I was like how many of these things have changed and remarkably like most of them had and I was like wow that’s amazing I did nothing and they just changed just the recognition of them changed awareness changed them and then I looked through all the ones that hadn’t changed and to a t each single one of them had a very heavy should attached to it and that’s when I started to realize that this way of managing ourselves by telling ourselves we should do things is just really ineffective so to keep it simple around the definition of should we’re talking about the moment that we tell ourselves that we should do something you know the voice in the head will tell you that you should do something and that’s like the most obvious thing but there’s also kind of an energetic should that happens it’s like it’s almost a muscular response or neurological response to something and it doesn’t always have to have the verbal you should do this you know you could just reach for the double flourless chocolate cake and you’ll just feel that kind of inside of you and that that is just a non-verbal should so I think it’s really important to see it as as both and what’s what’s wrong with like controlling ourselves in this way if these shoulds are kind of pointing us towards the things that we want or don’t want to be doing what’s what’s causing that to get in the way it’s because you put an extra layer on it if you’re just in the wants it’s an amazing fluid thing and when it gets into the shoulds it creates the threat like I said and a rigidity so as an example right if I try to control uh a two-year-old and I have that energy of like you will do this you should do this you should do this there’s one of two responses that happen in any human if I did it to you right now hey you should speak differently on this podcast right it immediately creates one of two things in you all right let’s do it for the audience here you should be listening to this podcast better you are not paying close enough attention if I’m treating you like that there’s one of two responses one of those responses is going to be Rebellion there’s just something innate in us it’s no no right response so okay that’s not a really effective way to create anything is just creating no’s and the other way the other thing that it does is you’re like oh you’re right I should have and it’s good the submission and it’s not surrender it’s submission it’s like I am weak and I will just do what you say and then you’ve got a whole bunch of disempowered people and that doesn’t really help much either right so especially if you’re in a company you want a company full of empowered people or you want um Community full of empowered people or you want yourself to feel empowered so every time you’re using the should what’s happening is that you are either creating your own internal Rebellion which is why you haven’t done the things you’ve been telling yourself you should do for decades because you’re rebelling against it or you’re creating a disempowered situation inside yourself and so you’re creating more of a victim mentality to this voice in your head that’s being abusive interesting what I noticed about myself is that when I when I think about like not telling myself what I should do or shouldn’t do anymore there becomes this fear that I’ll just become lazy or some kind of couch potato or I just won’t do the things that I should do yeah because I use that word you know it’s a totally exactly and what’s your response to that what what happens if we if we stop doing the should if we stop like setting out a path for what we want from ourselves from a perspective of being conscious of you know the risks or the threats yeah so right this is that inherent goodness thing that we’ve spoken about before which is basically that the idea is that you are a lazy slob piece of shit like just gonna like pick your ass and like live off of other people unless you tell yourself you should do something you know what I mean like could you imagine if you thought about somebody else that way you know unless I tell Joe that he should do a podcast he he’s just never gonna do it so I gotta tell him he should do it it is like it’s a nonsensical thing to really think like here I am doing this podcast nobody told me I should do it I wanted to do it and if you think about like kids from zero to eight years old there’s no internal should and they’re doing all sorts they’re developing crazy amounts compared to any other time in life they’re learning all sorts of things and it’s all just because they’re following their wants so on one level that’s a really important thing to note on the other thing you you actually may become a couch potato for a while which sounds a little weird but the thing is if you have been under threat for an extended period of time there’s going to be a need to relax there’s going to be a need to recover so if you’re going cold turkey on your shoulds yeah it’s you might actually just need to slow down for a bit it’s not going to be a couch potato the couch potato thing happens when you burn out and then you tell yourself you shouldn’t be burning out you should you shouldn’t you should stop playing the video games you should stop laying on the couch you should stop you should stop you should stop then you really will go into full Couch Potato mode if the natural burnout happens with the should then it it looks like depression so there might be a time where you need some more rest where you need to recover and you see this happen in schools all the time when there’s this thing called unlearning or unschooling or something like that where kids are taken out of the school that are burnt out and they take like five or six months and do very little and then all of a sudden they learn three or four times as quickly as they were in school and there’s lots of studies on this so it’s really you’re basically saying if I don’t put myself under threat of a should if I don’t tell myself that I’m bad if I don’t then I won’t and it’s just not my experience at all my experience is that people who are most generative in their life are people who want to do shit not who feel like they should do them yeah so it sounds like there’s like a it takes time to shift paradigms of thinking this sort of reminds me of a little bit of a thought experiment of like you know hold on a second that may be true that may not be true don’t don’t assume that one though at least for people listening for me turning off the shoulds in my in the voice in my head was very quick it didn’t take a tremendous amount of time once I really just understood oh this shit doesn’t work right it’s like then you know if if you know that you have a screw gun and every time you use the screw gun it strips screws you’re pretty much not going to use that screw gun it’s not going to take a lot of time to figure that out um if you start telling yourself you should stop using shoulds yeah it could take years yeah yeah that makes sense this kind of reminds me of this uh the thought experiment of having having the voice in your head be a roommate and if you were to go to like you know talk to somebody like a roommate or a friend and they were the kind of person that’s just going to tell you what you should do versus the kind of person that helps you find what you want yeah then you know you might either stop going to that person because it doesn’t feel like you’re really getting helped or you might become dependent on them telling what you should do right yeah most humans would just move out yeah yeah but there are some some of us are engineered or programmed to give up our own empowerment for a person like that but yeah yeah that’s right like like most of us who had a boss who spoke to us like the that should voice in our head we would quit or we would be miserable if that should voice in your head is really strong and really loud there is a strong case that you’re miserable whether you see it or not right so as we release ourselves from the oppression of these shoulds and we start listening to what we want and trusting that our wants are inherently good and healthy for us let’s get into the wants side of this then how would you define wants the want is just that impulse that moves through you that animates your actions that is what the want is and the should is just this egoic layer on top of it that slows the whole thing down so let me explain you’re sitting and you think to yourself I should exercise what’s actually happening is there’s an impulse and a want to exercise and it shows up and instead of just like oh cool and doing 10 jumping jacks you say to yourself I should go to the gym and then that just destroys your chances of actually working out or at least very much lowers your chances of working out so the want is just that very simple impulse that’s moving us that moves that eight-year-old that five-year-old that three-year-old it moves the toddler to walk better it moves the crawler to toddle it moves us to speak it moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones it is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line if we allow it if we allow it it’ll take us all the way to awakenings and and freedom and what if uh what if I’m you know listening to my want and my want is to have a big piece of chocolate cake that’s a really good question there’s one other piece that I think is really important to explain wants to be able to answer that question and the thing is is that wants are somatically expansive they’re intellectually empowering the want is very different if you attach to it or if you don’t attach to it so if you attach to say having that girlfriend Jennifer then you’re in craving which is different than want so the want is just that impulse it’s just that like empowering expansive impulse so if you look at the cake and you’re in that like empowering expansive thing that’s very different than the way most people want a cake what they think is wanting a cake which is this either this struggle I want it but I don’t want I want it I don’t want I want it I don’t want it that’s not that’s not a clean want there’s still some refinement that needs to go there or there’s just like that unconscious shoving the cake in their mouth and calling it a want so the want is something that feels very expansive so if you look at something like a chocolate cake and it feels very expansive to sit and eat that thing then yeah follow the want because the thing about the wants in general is that they you have to follow them to deepen into them so what that means is you want to follow the chocolate cake because you want to have this sense pleasure great have the sense of pleasure and then you start finding out what the deeper sense pleasures are you follow that want home and you find out it has seven more beautiful siblings so if the want is clean it doesn’t matter if it’s a short-term or a long-term healthy in your mind in your superego it’s far more about allowing that movement so you can find the next step right you can’t want to run unless you wanted to learn how to walk you have to actually get to the walking point to have an effective next level want and that’s how it works is the wants move us so a toddler they just want to walk and walk well maybe maybe as a toddler you want to run but then you can want to play baseball and then you can want to play basketball really really well and so it’s the same thing with our wants when we start really getting in touch with our wants then they really transform you know it’s like the one is I want a million dollars and there’s some shame with that and so it’s not a clear impulse and then we’re like what is that clear impulse it’s like oh I want to be empowered sounds very relevant to a career path as well something I heard a story recently from a friend who’s a lawyer and halfway through their first semester they were like okay this is I’m not going to do this I don’t want to be a lawyer this sucks um and the experience was they were like these are all the things that I have to do to get like to where you know this path is supposed to put me and it doesn’t look fun at all so they right this person described that they they simply stopped caring about what they were supposed to be doing and they started paying attention to what they actually wanted and they were like actually there’s all kinds of things that I want to be doing that I could do if I was enabled with this law degree and so they started kind of just making it there they took all the classes they wanted that nobody else was taking yeah and ended up kind of on some trends that they were ahead of their game on or ahead of the trend on yeah uh as a result of following the way they wanted to be a lawyer and they ended up really loving their career that’s exactly right if you’re doing your shoulds and you’re basically following rigidity you’re following um a tightness and you’re going to have that kind of tight life you’re going to have a life that’s very that’s a very rigid life and if you’re following your wants your life becomes much more expansive I like what you had been saying about uh craving as well it sounds like craving as distinct from wants is like a craving is a want that you don’t want but you really don’t want it yeah there’s there’s a thing about the want right so if you just take the want viscerally and you don’t try to get there you don’t try to get to the end if you just take the want viscerally you you can feel it let’s actually let’s do this for a second right so if you close your eyes and you feel a really deep want inside of you have a deep one not a superficial one but like a very deep one like maybe a want for a deeper form of intimacy or a want for a more expansive Consciousness or a want for more love in your life and you feel that want and you take it in and you don’t worry about whether you can get it or not you don’t even think about how to get it you just feel what it is to want is just a feeling like anger or sadness it’s just like just allow that feeling in your system without trying to get to the goal that experience is really pleasant it’s really quite lovely it’s to me the way it works in my system is it is one of the closest feelings to love to allow a desire deeply inside of you I think it’s why so many of the the uh Sufi poets they talk about desire in this like like this way that they just love desire so this longing because that longing is so close to love it’s so close to that expansive acceptance of everything and so that’s what wanting is now I gotta get it how do I get it why can’t I get it that’s craving and that’s painful yeah yeah this reminds me of like a lot of different spiritual traditions that tell us that craving is a hindrance to freedom like for example Buddhism’s principle of non-attachment or Christianity’s warnings about the desires of the flesh yeah so there’s there’s those spiritual traditions and then there’s like the tantric spiritual traditions and people think that they’re at odds but they’re really not at odds at all what’s happening there is that people have been beaten out of their wants and so they start turning cravings into an excuse not to want to not allow themselves to want anymore but if you’re really deeply closely looking into your own personal experience the craving is the thing that they’re talking about and the wanting the desire that the Sufis are talking about the tantric people are talking about is they’re two different things that are happening inside of your system that’s right yeah it’s interesting that the exercise that we just did about the wanting for myself I was thinking about like having a healthy body and being Being Fit and having strength and flexibility and in feeling the wanting I was I was like imagining moving my body and having having range of motion and flexibility and strength and the moment I started trying to figure out how I was going to get there yeah then all of a sudden it turned into oh but I’d have to work out it’s like suddenly the working out feels like a chore right the actual wanting of being healthy that the way that I was imagining that was actually working out was the equivalent of moving and using my body exactly and if you just stick with that as a daily practice like how do I want to be in my body right now and you just 30 minutes of how do I want to be in my body right now would get you exactly where you want to be in your body and how much more appealing is that I have to work out today or how do I want to be in my body for 30 minutes it seems like it’s almost no different and it’s like worlds and worlds apart right let’s get this into into the context of business and like uh achievement a tremendous amount of successful executives are deeply attached to winning and succeeding and it seems to be working well for them in many regards how would you factor that into this right yeah there’s people who tell themselves they should do stuff and apparently they’re pretty successful at it or they’re deeply attached they have a deep craving and they’re successful at getting their cravings met so for me it’s pretty simple there is the intention which is critical so I’m not suggesting to drop all intention in life and so we have our intention we have that want we have the impulse and that’s a really really important thing it’s it gives us a North star it gives us a heading that we move down and to hold that intention is absolutely completely important to getting stuff done in the world of accomplishing stuff in the world being attached to succeeding is absolutely a fine way to succeed it’s not the most efficient way to succeed it is not the most enjoyable way to succeed but it is absolutely a fine way to succeed so you can really really get attached to something you can work at it and you can get there and in fact it’s really important to have some of that if you’re going to get anywhere in life and and that’s the intention so you can have that intention without that craving without that deep attachment and if you don’t have it you’re you’re lucky to get anywhere so that intention is really quite important but if you’re going to put attachment on top of that intention on top of that want then you are dragging then you are like throwing an anchor out and sailing across the ocean with your anchor out it is not going to be the most effective so the real thing is that intention like what is the context of it and um what’s the way that you make it most enjoyable so let me give you an example so if I look at every single CEO that I know who has been very very successful their intention wasn’t to make money they weren’t attached to making money what they were attached to was being the best or beating their competition or reducing carbon in the world or being the best at customer service they had some sort of intention that got what that was past this intention of just succeeding so their attachment was beyond succeeding because if you’re just attached to the succeeding part it’s a lot more difficult if succeeding is something that you have to do to get to the part that you’re attached to then it’s easier so the attachment isn’t the most efficient way to get to where you want to go to have that strong attachment and it’s definitely not the most enjoyable way to get to where you want to go but the intention absolutely critical does that make sense yeah yeah totally it seems like having having the intention versus having the attachment to success the intention makes it easier to pivot like if your intention is to build a company or build a product that reduces carbon in the world there are many ways to do that and you could start out with one idea of doing it and discover that there’s different ways of doing it or that one one of them just isn’t working in the market and it seems like it would be easier to go through the sort of like get out of the local optimum or maybe you just have to let go of what you are doing and start something new which is just really common in any kind of business endeavor this idea of pivoting and flowing with reality but if you’re really attached to a particular success then you might be more resistant to make changes of course that seem in the short term to lead away from your goal of success yeah that’s right so that’s right so you have your intention you have your intention out there that’s where you know which way you’re going we’ll call that like the goal or the want that intention is kind of what’s moving you in the direction and then you can have different attitudes towards that goal towards that want the attitude could become a should the attitude could be I’m scared of getting to the goal I’m angry that I haven’t gotten to the goal I have absolute faith that I will be there all of those ways are different attitudes towards having that goal you’re not going to get there without the goal but the most efficient attitude to get to the goal is to be in the want of it not the should of it it is to be in the enjoyment of it not the rigidity of it that’s the more efficient way to get there and and to be beyond the goal itself is that that goal of succeeding is really just a necessary step to get to your deeper goal so give me some more examples of of holding an intention without the should so you’re running a company and you have a revenue goal of 100 million dollars you can hold that as I should get to a hundred million dollars you can hold that goal as I want to get to 100 million dollars you can hold that goal as I will get to 100 million dollars you can hold that goal as I can’t wait till I get to 100 million dollars so that the way you hold that goal is going to affect how much energy you have it’s going to affect how rigid you are in it it’s going to affect your ability to be flexible and then the second level of it is choosing that goal as far as whether you’re going to make that like the easy goal or the long-term goal so are you saying I want to get a hundred million dollars just to get 100 million dollars are you saying I want to get a hundred million dollars so that I can build a spaceship to get to Mars or are you saying I want to get 100 million dollars so I can beat the competition so all of those things are important so it’s not the intention or the goal it is how you approach the goal how you attach to the relationship you have with the goal that’s the important piece for efficiency and enjoyment and feeling like you should be doing this prescriptive path towards the goal is controlling yourself with threat essentially correct that’s right and it could work short term but it’s definitely not going to work long term that’s right what makes it that we don’t see the inefficiency of our shoulds when we’re in them like if if it is the case that you know everything that we don’t do in life that we want to do and everything that we do do that we want to stop doing is all locked in place by these shoulds what makes it so opaque to us yeah it’s it’s a shame situation the way that you can look at it is even if you take it up a level for a second so what’s the important thing about having the intention what’s the important thing about having the goal is that it tells you what questions to ask so if I say to you you need to start a company and that company needs to sell widgets to 10 people then you’re going to ask questions to get to that goal but if I say you need to sell widgets to 100 million people you’re going to ask different questions you’re going to say huh maybe I have to think about Venture Capital maybe I have to think about private equity maybe I have to think about you know distribution at that scale that you’re not going to have to think about if you’re selling 10 widgets so the goal is important because it very very much helps us determine what questions to ask and that’s why goals are so important but what most people do is they put some shame into those goals tell themselves they should reach the goals not that they want to not that they can but that they should reach the goals and then all of a sudden those goals become a burden they become like oh if I don’t do that I’m bad and so that’s what makes it hard for us to see the shoulds is that it it makes us think that we’re bad the should makes us think that we’re bad and if we think that we’re bad it’s very hard to see what actually motivates us right it’s the same thing like in wars right if two countries are warring with each other and that whole war has to depend on people thinking the other side is bad if people look up and say you know what they’re just people we’re just people we’re just both trying to get along the war is going to stop so to have that internal war of should means that you have to think you’re bad and that’s what makes it so hard to see through the should to see through the war right what’s really strange about it is that you can see it from a manager 10 miles away right you’re sitting there and you see a manager like remember you should you should you should you’re like oh my God that’s not gonna work that’s horribly ineffective there’s been hundreds of management books saying don’t do that because it doesn’t work and in psychological studies but we’ll do it to ourselves all day long and we will recognize it outside but we won’t recognize it inside yeah it’s as if the uh the moment we say we should be doing something we are immediately like the structure of that should is to flatten all of our wants to go do that one thing because we’ve prioritized it but if if we are routinely doing that thing where we’re suppressing our wants to do the thing we should do then we can’t hear or feel our wants anymore yeah that’s right and and the wants are just kind of for many of us are very very scary it’s a very scary thing to have a want because we were taught at a young age not to have wants we don’t have that want because mom won’t be happy you don’t have that want because you won’t be codependent with that don’t have that want because blah blah blah blah blah right there’s just a lot of people are told to disassociate from their wants they’re not they’re not taught that their wants are amazingly beautiful things that can guide them in their entire life yeah let’s talk more about that like what makes wanting so vilified in our society my experience is that it’s it’s there’s a pain that we feel from being rejected in our wants it’s like a deep level of rejection so we’re all kind of school kids that got deeply rejected you know when we asked someone out on a date and so we’re like hesitant to do it again because our wants are this deeply intimate thing they’re there’s very vulnerable thing and they are at the core of us and if they’ve been rejected we don’t want to feel that rejection again so I think that’s the internal process externally if you have a whole bunch of people who are codependent or whole bunch of people who were told that they were selfish as kids which really if you’re told that you were selfish as a kid that really just means that you weren’t doing what your mom and dad wanted you to do but if you were told that then having somebody own their wants is very uncomfortable for you and so there’s a kind of this external world that is uncomfortable with people owning their wants and there’s also this external world of people who like just can’t wait for that person to be to be owning their wants some more it’s kind of like rock and roll right so back in the day rock and roll was there and there’s these people who shut up and they’re like I’m gonna get whatever I want I want to you know do this and do that and and there’s this group of people like yes and there’s a group of people like Devil and that’s how it works when you’re really owning your wants um especially the earlier wants the later ones is the ones start to refine and start to become more and more beautiful then it’s a little bit less likely to happen but we all start with the early wants and to own them gets a certain level of rejection because other people would have to feel their own wants and the thing about wants in general is that it’s our human nature to want like if you you can play this game with friends and you just after every sentence just say what it is that you wanted to get out of that sentence and you will find a want in every single sentence that you speak like right now I want to have you guys understand what I’m saying right now I want you to taste the deep pleasure of wanting so there’s always this subconscious want behind almost every sentence we have it is such a part of our human nature we cannot get away from it all we can do is own it or we can sublimate it and should is just a way of sublimating it which is why it doesn’t work as effectively right and so and so I’m going to say something right now because I want to participate in this podcast and feel relevant want to respond so that you know that I love you and I care for you I want to end the pregnant pause um well a lot of what you were saying about like the the societal aspect is that it’s uncomfortable for people to feel their wants and part of what that what it is is you know people have a problem seeing other people want what they want because that makes them feel the pain of their own wants and the pain of our own wants seems to be linked to something we’ve discussed on some other episodes uh the consequences of wanting like the potential consequence if I want something I might not get it I might have to feel disappointment I might feel I might be judged I might you know break this cozy structure of this job that I’m in or this relationship that I’m in because my wants feel incongruent with with that yeah the interesting thing about that in general is that not getting our wants met is not actually as scary as as you know we want or pop psychology would say that it is because we all have a dozen wants that we haven’t had met and when you know it doesn’t devastate us all the time I mean how many people listening to this podcast want to have 10 million dollars more in the bank hasn’t happened didn’t devastate any of us yeah I think it’s the exposure the vulnerability of showing your want and having it rejected that’s the the deeper scare yeah or you know admitting that you want 10 million dollars in the bank and people saying I’m judging you for that greedy yeah yeah exactly and the amazing thing is when you totally own a want oftentimes the want goes away almost immediately yeah I really want 10 million dollars in the bank and if you fully feel that all the way and you’re just like oh yeah 10 million you know and just feel that want oftentimes it just it just starts shifting and it’s just like oh what I want is security and then it’s like oh what I really want is to feel empowered in every situation but if you don’t allow yourself to have the want it can’t move through you it’s just like if you don’t allow yourself to get angry you can’t move through you if you don’t allow yourself to get sad it can’t move through you it’s just another emotion that needs to move through you and is so pleasant when it does so it sounds like on one level you’re saying that it is an impulse and on another level you’re saying it’s an emotion can you get into that distinction a little bit more that’s a great question let me feel inside for a moment and really see what the distinction is there it seems like there’s this impulse that moves the way it’s working in my system is there’s this impulse to move to say these words to be in front of my computer right now to answer your question there’s like this natural impulse and if that impulse meets any any um friction then this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur and as this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur that becomes the feeling that’s the feeling that’s there and if I fully feel the feeling the friction starts to fade so there is the impulse side of the wanting and then there is also the emotional side of the wanting and it’s what distinguishes I’m just gonna walk to the bathroom right now and there’s no experience of wanting in that process because there’s no friction met but as soon as that impulse meets any level of friction then there’s this experience of wanting and if you fully feel that experience it turns deeply into a loving expansive experience and then that friction starts to go away I want to hear one more story from you like a personal story where you relevant to how you arrived at all of this I’d be happy to share a story Brett um it’s a story of shoulds and wants and when I was in my earlier in my Venture Capital career I had this idea that I really should be making money and it was kind of foreign to me because it wasn’t something that it was really ever important to me before and it was a combination of a feeling of indebtedness to the investors and also doing a good job and being valuable but that this should started appearing in my life at that point and and then I was sitting in a hammock and I read this news at some point I remember the time specifically and um I read this news this company that was formed with almost no money sold for you know multi-billions of dollars and it felt like just an absolute kick in my stomach just like a whack in my stomach and I stopped and I went oh where where did I feel that for the first time and I traced it back not intellectually but like my entire body traced back that feeling to the first time I felt it and the first time I felt it was trying to please my father as a kid and it was like Oh and it was not pleasable at that time you know to please him at least from my point of view wasn’t possible and I saw that this whole money making activity had nothing to do with actually making money it had to and the should behind it had nothing to do with it it was like this very early should that I had of should be pleasing my father that that was a very ingrained should and it was at that moment that I was like okay hold on a second this doesn’t have anything to do with money and it’s a should what do I want what I really want to do here and what I realized is like I just wanted to create great cultures for people I wanted to be a part of creating great cultures for people to work in and that changed everything it changed my approach it changed my ability to be effective it just changed everything as soon as I just moved from the should that was driven by an early feeling to a want which was very present and it was just very immediate and all of a sudden you know everything started to open up and flourish in my life in a new way yeah wow thank you and um how do you want to end this hmm I want to express a deep gratitude for everybody who’s listening who’s dedicating to understanding themselves who honors me with with choosing to be here as part of this experience my deepest want is just to is like a very deep bow to everybody who’s listening and to say that I wouldn’t be here without people who were bowing to me I am grateful to be bowing to you and my deep hope is that you will bow to the people who appear before you well Joe thank you for uh for taking the time to help all of us build our culture internally in our companies thanks for doing the work man thanks for 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