After seven years chasing a career in the arts, Joe realized the controlling, soul-killing system he’d run from in finance was the same one he’d run into in Hollywood — and that he’d sacrificed years for something he discovered he didn’t actually want. The deeper insight was that we rarely know we want a thing until we have it; the wanting is often just an idea, like the person who craved a Hummer and hated it once they owned it.
“Everything that I think I want, I don’t actually know that I want it. I just have an idea that I want it. But when I get it, I may or may not want it.”
So he flipped his approach: stop chasing an imagined future, and instead say yes to what feels good in the present. Saying yes to everything at first, then narrowing to what he loved, revealed something about energy.
“If I was doing what I loved, I wasn’t burning out. There was actually a lot of energy in my system every day.”
Shifting from “I’m doing this for the future” to “I’m doing this for right now” gave him a tremendous surge of energy — and the same principle later shaped how he built his work: invite rather than chase, enjoy it or burn out.
Related Concepts
- Money works for you when it expresses your alignment
- Making happiness conditional on the future destroys present connection
- A lack of enjoyment is a diagnostic signal
- Good decisions feel right now, not later
- Ambition survives beneath the resistance, waiting to be set free
- Wanting matters more than what you want
- Exploration not achievement is the real urge underneath potential anxiety
- Wanting is aliveness
- Intention without attachment is the most effective approach to goals