Changing Desires
The Hidden Risks in Rewiring What We Want
Imagine if you will that you wanted to kickstart a game, but you spend all your time gaming instead - what would you do? (Well, unfortunately for me, I don’t have to imagine too hard - pre-order bureaucracy today!)
For me, the first step in curing my deadlock was to identify my core desires. You can do this a ton of ways, but what I found helpful was doing a values identification activity. I talked about my hopes and dreams, what I love doing, and when I feel fully alive. And as it turns out, creating is part and parcel of me. I just knew I had to make games. So now that I know my core desire, how do I execute 💀 the leaf desire and to execute 🚀 the core one? As far as I know, there are two ways to go about it: willpower and changing desires.
Hardworking folk choose to use willpower.
They push past pain. They tough it out. They forgo to go far. And look, I know this works. I have friends that have blossomed copious wills to fight their leaf desires in order to pursue their core.
Smart folk, however, choose a different option. They muck around with what they want.
They make so there is nothing else they would want to do more than their core desire. They do this, I suspect, because it’s easier to change a positive desire to negative rather than the other way around.
For me, gaming was getting in the way of my core desire, to launch my game on kickstarter. So the first thing I did was muck with my desire to play board games.
I raised the bar on the quality of games I played. I mixed gaming with hard activities like exercise. Or perhaps, the most pernicious of all, I started to think that being a gamer was inherently bad.
Notice I didn’t ever try to attack the desire head on, because attacking makes the desire more powerful. Instead, paint the picture that gamers are uncool. And slowly, your desire for gaming will likely wane. Time that you did not have before will blossom and fill up with your core desire.
Now, throughout the project, you have to keep a watchful eye on how you're doing. What amount of time are you idle? Do you still allow yourself time to feel fully alive? Because sometimes, as you strip away your leaf desires, your overall energy and will deplete. But the far more fatal disease is that by stripping away leaf desires, you eventually rot the core.
There have been times in my life that I was so monomaniacal about my core desires, that I ruthlessly hacked away at my surface ones, and I stopped playing games all together.
The truly pernicious problem of changing desires, is that you might inadvertently lose your core desires. For me, launching a game on kickstarter was tacitly connected to my love of games. So when I stopped gaming altogether, I diminished that desire and a part of myself. Thankfully, I recognized this early and stopped mucking around.
Because without that core desire, you become a rudderless ship. Powerful, monomaniacal, but ultimately self-contained. Finite. A closed loop. A Peter Keating.
