Are your desires original, or are you copying someone else?
Measuring success, avoiding rivalries and finding your path
1/ My totally unoriginal yardstick for measuring ‘success’
Several years back I met a coach at an event who asked me about my dreams. I rattled off the usual about promotions, money, business, and so forth. I proclaimed that I wanted to be “successful” in these areas. She followed with a question: “How do you define success, exactly?” This left me scrambling to come up with specific definitions and goals that I hadn’t really thought through.
As I said these goals out loud, they felt hollow. I thought, wait a second, are these actually my goals? Or did someone tell me these would be good goals to have and I simply adopted them as my own? I can’t remember what I said exactly but it was something along the lines of:
Save money to quit job
Get people management experience
Travel around Asia
Launch a startup
Write a book
Holy shit, I realized. I’m completely unoriginal.
2/ Wanting what other people want
In the book Wanting, author Luke Burgis talks about the influence of “Mimetic desire,” or our tendency to want what other people want.
“...Most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.”
We might think that our desires are purely intrinsic. That we’ve come up with them on our own. An intrinsic desire is saying ‘I want to make beautiful things, and I don’t care what anyone thinks.’ And that beauty is defined in your own eye.
The opposite is Mimetic Desire. Copying others. Most people who bought bitcoin didn’t really know what it was. Their friends were buying it, so they bought some too. This is a very obvious example of Mimetic Desire.
What’s the opposite? Intrinsic desire.
Your goal to be healthy, raise a family, and make some piece of art probably fall on the other end of the spectrum. Goals that stem from self-expression and our own biology are harder to fake.
A good way to know if your desires are really intrinsic or mimetic is by your emotional reaction: are you often jealous/envious or are you satisfied with the simple act of doing your work?
Feeling “I want what that person wants” is a sure sign that you’re not being led by an internal compass, and are using others as a yardstick. And then “they” become an object of desire, which leads to conflict.
This desire is usually led by proximity. For example, unless you’re a billionaire, you probably don’t find yourself being jealous of Mark Zukerberg or Richard Branson (although I am willing to bet they are jealous of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos).
Look around you. Are you more jealous of the entrepreneur at your co-working space who already raised a round of funding, or the colleague who is making more money than you with the same title, or the parent who has a gifted kid that plays five sports and gets straight As and yours is barely making Cs?
“The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting
If they’re doing what they’re doing for the wrong reasons, CEOs are jealous of other CEOs, moms are jealous of other moms, and crypto traders envy other crypto traders.
3/ Ferrari vs. Lamborghini
What’s wrong with having the same goals and being a little bit competitive in the process, or even a bit envious?
Well, if happiness is a goal, then envy is certainly not the path. And the problem isn’t so much having similar goals as others. It’s adopting these goals without ever asking the question: Is this really what I want to do? You end up doing things you don’t really love and living life in constant battles fueled by your own ego.
Like when I built my startup because “that’s what people did” without questioning my own motivations. Because it didn’t come from within, it led me to look for external validation — money raised, customers, revenue, etc., instead of just enjoying what I was doing for the sake of doing it. Whoops.
When our desires are defined by an external compass (money, fame, likes, views, titles, etc.), this tends to fuel competition and rivalry. Mimetic desire leads to rivalry.
This isn’t about materialism, necessarily. It’s about your approach and intentions. For example, when Ferrucio Lamborghini drove a Ferrari for the first time, he said, “Hey, the clutch is a bit annoying on this. I can make a better car than this.”
So he did. He scratched his own itch, and started Lamborghini.
Then came the pivot point. He could have tried to go head-to-head with the Ferrari brand and compete in racing circuits to show off his car was better. But very intentionally, he chose not to.
Instead, Lamborghini chose to keep making his cars better and better. He avoided the direct rivalry with Ferrari, focused on the craft, and ended up building an (arguably) even more amazing car.
4/ Internal progress vs. material attainment
There’s a story I heard from James Altucher about Warren Buffet’s right hand man, billionaire Charlie Munger, who gave a speech at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. As Munger spoke, he digressed into a paranoid rant about the federal government and taxes. He had so much money, but was afraid of losing even a little bit of it. He had to be pulled off stage.
Some rich people give away all their money, like the CEO from Patagonia. Others build underground bunkers, dozens of shell companies and tall fences to lock themselves out from the rest of the world. The saying is true. Money doesn’t change you - it only brings out more of what’s already inside.
The billionaire:
The Buddha:
We know that material wealth isn’t a sign of spiritual wealth, otherwise saints would have been rolling in boatloads of cash. Buddha wasn’t a billionaire, but was rich in spiritual attainment.
And yet, we tend to measure what’s easiest to measure as a sign of “success” or “progress”. This is the mimetic trap!
It’s much harder to see what’s inside someone. We have to really pay attention to their actions and behaviors. It’s much easier to see if they’re wearing a Rolex or Casio or what company they’re working at.
But you probably don’t need to worry about what’s inside — or outside — other people. You only need to worry about what’s inside of you.
The American author Parker Palmer wrote:
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
The more you are looking at other people or external validators for your happiness, the more mimetic your desire probably is.
If you don’t feel like the author of your own life, that’s your sign that others are defining it for you. The goal, then, is to find out what you really want to do – what you’re meant to do – and to do it well.
5/ Sit in a room and ask yourself these questions
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote the seventeenth-century physicist Blaise Pascal.
Find a quiet place. If you can’t, put in some earplugs and then put on some noise canceling headphones. Sit for a few minutes and contemplate the following.
Here are a few questions and a framework you can use to uncover intrinsic motivators vs. your mimetic ones:
(1) pay attention to the interior movements of the heart when contemplating different desires—which give a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and which give satisfaction that endures?
(2) ask yourself which desire is more generous and loving;
(3) put yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed;
(4) finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from.
What did you come up with?
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