100 Ways To Live A Better Life – 49. Get A Thing You Wanted For A Long Time

But you didn’t had time or money to get it. Just go out and get it. Not only it will boost your self-respect, but it will also free your desire channel, which may be a little bit clogged by having that desire for such a long time.

In my experience, if you keep your internal focus too much on something you want, other things will start to fade inside you. You’ll start to idealize the object of your desire, pushing it outside the current reality.

Just go out and reach to what you want. It will be expensive, maybe, but at least you will free your internal focus from this obsession. You will actually unblock your normal flow of aspirations.

Dreaming too much about having something equals making that something inaccessible. 

The Subtle Working Of Getting What You Want, Fast

This doesn’t mean you should go broke by getting what you want, or, even worse, stepping on other people toes to get it. It rather means taking out that object from the area of “someday I will have this” and put it into the area “hell, I just got it”.

This works in a surprising way. At the first sight, it looks like it encourages attachment and accumulation and cheap consumerism. For a while, it may even do that. But, as you exercise the process of getting what you want, the clogginess will move from the mind to your current reality. Your mind will be free from desires, as you patch them one by one with the corresponding objects, and those objects will start to occupy your immediate field of perception. You will start to materialize stuff, for real.

And in the beginning there will be a lot of confusion. And things will get really crowded for a while. You will be surrounded by more and more stuff. You may get that big house you wanted, like, forever. And that car. Or even two cars. And clothes, and gadgets. And so on.

And here’s where it gets interesting: slowly, the effort of maintaining and managing all that stuff you own will overcome the joy of using it. The things you own end up owning you. That’s from “Fight Club”, of course.

And, eventually, you realize you simply don’t need all that stuff.

Maybe the desire itself was injected by somebody else and you picked it up unconsciously (advertising does that all the time). Maybe the desire was a placeholder for something with a deeper meaning, like an honest relationship, like the need for connecting authentically with somebody else. Whatever the reason, by getting the stuff you wanted, and getting it fast, without waiting to become a chronic imbalance, and, again, without significant trouble in your life (or other’s life), you will free yourself from it.

I know that because I’ve been there. I longed to have certain things and I delayed the process of actually getting them to the point that I started to worship them. To make them seem so precious and important, that I pushed their significance way beyond their real use. Only to find out, once I got them, I don’t really need them.

And the thing I learned was that, if there’s any sign of obsession in getting something, I should just go for it. If it’s really useful, it will stick. If not, at least I killed the desire early.

further reading

Performance versus Fulfillment

Real Value versus Perceived Value




2 thoughts on “100 Ways To Live A Better Life – 49. Get A Thing You Wanted For A Long Time”

  1. Great post! I think I’ve been dreaming for many things for a long time, it’s time to step in action and create them in reality. I love your saying about dreams there, indeed, when we dream too much about a desire that we have, it becomes inaccessible, a goal far away from us.

    We must not forget about taking action each and everyday!

    Inspiring article.
    Ps. I signed up for your 100 days challenge, I expect it to be awesome!

    Reply

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