SDS 090: Do what you want

Hello and welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Very excited to have you back. Today is episode number 90. What a journey. We’re getting very close to episode number 100. Can’t wait to hit that checkpoint. And today we’re talking about doing what you want. I’m actually reading a book now, it’s a Russian book, it was recommended to me by my mother. It’s called “Hachu i Budu” by Michael Labkovsky for those Russian listeners out there, if you want to pick that book up and check it out. It’s very good, actually. If you translate the name into English, it would be “I Want, and Therefore I Will.” And the book is written by a trained psychologist, who’s been practicing for many years, I think 30 years. And he’s put all of his experience from all of his sessions and all of his clients into this book to kind of pinpoint all of the most common issues that people come across in their lives that make them unhappy. And so there’s quite a lot of things that I’ve already learned from this book even though I’m only 20% through the book. But at the same time, I wanted to share a couple of these with you.

So one point that he talks about, and it’s kind of like the fundamental part of his whole philosophy, is that the meaning of life is actually to enjoy yourself. To enjoy life, to enjoy this life as an adventure, and have a great time, have a great journey, have fantastic experiences, and always have fun. Feel that you’re actually living. And the question is then, how can you enjoy life if you’re not always doing what you want to do? If you’re doing things that you don’t want to do, but for some reason you have to do, or you feel you have to do, then at those points in your life, you’re going to not enjoy life. And therefore, you’re not fulfilling the meaning, or the purpose, of your life.

That sounds ridiculous, right? Why would we do things that we don’t want to do? But if you think about it, a lot of the time, we actually are doing it. And, in fact, most of the time, you’ll find yourself – or I, personally, have gone through this. Most of the time, you find yourself doing things that you don’t actually want to do, but for some reason, they’re on your agenda, and you feel that you’re required to. For instance, as kids, as we’re growing up, we have certain things that our parents tell us to do. Rather than asking us what we want to do, they have a whole perspective of the world of their own, and they tell us what we need to do. They come from a good place, they want us to be successful, they want us to be happy, and so on. But instead of asking us what we want, sometimes – or very often – they tell us what we should do.

Or societal norms dictate things that you should be doing, like around you, you might feel that, for instance, when you’re going to work, you have to be at work at 9, you have to go back at 5, or what the fashion is, what you need to be wearing, and so on. And also, there’s expectations of other people in our lives, people that you might be in a relationship with, or your family expectations, or your friends’ expectations. And so on. And so, in order to please everybody, or if we don’t put it in that way, not just to please everybody, but to make sure that all of these expectations, societal norms, and all of the things that are put into your head by your parents are met, you find yourself doing things that you don’t actually want to be doing. But you have told yourself that either it’s the right thing to do at the time, or it’s about time to do this, or that somebody else will get upset if I don’t do it, or I need to be doing this, and so on. Whereas, in his book, Michael Labkovsky says that the only thing that matters is, do you want to do it? You should only be doing things that you can say honestly to yourself, “I want to do this. And therefore, I am doing it. And I will continue doing it.” If there is something that you think you need to do and you don’t want to do, well think again. Then probably you shouldn’t do it. Because that way, you’re not – ultimately, you have one life, and you should be living it for yourself, and you should be doing exactly the things that you want.

On that point, then he extends further, and he talks about why is it that we sometimes do these things that we don’t want to. How to dig deeper into psychology. And I really like psychology, and I really like how our brains work in that sense. And one of the core drivers is fears. But a lot of the time, people do certain things just because they fear consequences of not doing those things.

So in Tony Robbins’ language, and if you’ve heard this podcast before, you probably know by now that I follow Tony Robbins, and I like his events, and I like his philosophy behind psychology and how we operate. In his language, there are only two things that drive people. It’s pain and pleasure. And so fear is a way for our consciousness to protect ourselves from pain. And so, basically, we’re afraid of pain, of being left alone, of becoming unsuccessful, of losing our income, of losing our health, and so on. And that’s why we do certain things. But whereas when you do things out of the want, when you actually want to do it, it’s because you are driven not by pain, but by pleasure. So that’s completely two different worlds. In one, you’re running away from something (pain). In the other one, you’re running towards something (pleasure). 

What he does in his book, I like this part, he gives a few examples of people (I don’t know if these are actual, real people, or just imaginary, or he aggregated some experiences of his clients to come up with these stories, and these are short stories about just very vivid examples of when people are doing things which they don’t want to be doing. So I want to read out a couple here, I will just convey a couple. I can’t really read them out, they’re in Russian. But I can convey a couple of them here. And see for yourself if you can understand where this person is going wrong. Because it’s often very helpful to look at these examples.

So let’s look at example number 1. A woman is getting married simply because it’s time.  And because everybody around her is telling her, “look, it’s time for you to get married, you should start a family, all your friends are already married,” and so on, and so on. But she doesn’t really actually love the person that she’s about to get married to. The wedding is in a couple of days, and she admitted to herself that she doesn’t really love the person. But she gives herself all these reasons, like “all my friends are married, everybody’s telling me, my parents are pressuring me, I want to start a family,” and so on. And she’s not getting married. So, in that case, what is she being driven by? Is she being driven by pain or pleasure? She’s being driven by pain. Or, in other words, by fear. She’s being driven by fear of never getting married, in that case. Or the fear of upsetting her parents. Or not being like her friends. Example number 2 is a person who is working at a job, so this was an example of a lady who studied something about literature, I think she studied literature, at university, but then the global crisis hit, she couldn’t find a job in literature, and so now she is a receptionist somewhere. She is working on the admin side of things for some business that she never thought she would be working, in this industry. In that case, she knows she doesn’t love the job. She knows she doesn’t actually want to be doing this. She really wanted to study what she studied, she studied literature, she loved literature, in her breaks she reads books under the desk, and allshe dreams about is getting into literature, and so on. And what is driving her in this case? Again, fear. She is afraid of, if she follows her dreams, and what she actually wants to do, she’ll be left without a job. Example number 3 is a guy hanging out with “friends”. So some people that somehow he met, and he just goes drinking with them, but he doesn’t really enjoy the conversations, he doesn’t really enjoy their company, but he just does that even though he doesn’t really want to do it, simply because again, he’s afraid that if he doesn’t hang out with these people, at his age, he doesn’t have any proper friends, he will be left alone and he will be just very bored at home, or he will just feel miserable because he’s alone, so he takes what he can get, and these guys that he somehow interacted with, and now he fills that gap that he is meeting people, and he’s having a social life, but he doesn’t actually want to do it. He doesn’t want to go clubbing all the time, he doesn’t want to go drinking all the time, and so on. Again, driven by fear.

Final example, when a person is in the wrong profession. Some guy wanted to study foreign cultures at university, but because his dad was veryrational about the likelihood about him getting into that specific university which he wants was very low, so he said “no, go study this,” and he actually did, and he studied agriculture or something, and now he is running an agriculture business, which is going very well. He’s making a lot of money. But he’s not enjoying himself. He’s not actually doing what he wants. He always sits and reminisces about the magical time when he wanted to study foreign cultures and how that would be great and so on, but now he’s already 50 years old, and he thinks that it’s too late to do anything about it.

Business is going well, at least he’s going to have money, he’s going to leave a business for his family, and his kids can run it, and so on and so on. What is he being driven by? By pleasure or by pain? By pain again. Because he’s afraid of not being as successful in something else, starting all over again, fear of failure, and so on. So, as you can see, in all of these examples, all these four people are living not a fulfilled and happy life. They’re living a mediocre life. They’re accepting some very poor, in terms of fulfilment, level of life.  And they’re all driven by fear. And so they could easily change their lives around, and the author of the book returns to these examples later on, and he says, so if that woman, for example, the one that is getting married to the wrong person, if she admitted it to herself, and then just said, “no, I’m not doing what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do this, regardless of all my fears.

I’m now just not going to do it.” And she would walk out of there, not get married, and actually if she did what she wanted to do in life, whatever it could be, like travel, study, or meet more people, or something like that, she would eventually meet the person that’s perfect for her, she would meet the love of her life. That’s just how the world works. Then if there’s that lady clinging on to a job because of fear of crisis and not finding another job, if she just went and did what she wanted, if she just said, “no, I’m not going to do this because I don’t want to,” quit her job, and then studied, or looked for opportunities in that space where she wants to, whenever you do what you actually want, the universe turns around and helps you, and gives you those right opportunities. And she would find a job in what she was studying, in literature, what she really loved so much. The guy who is hanging out with his friends at the bars, just at some point stopped hanging out, and instead invested that time into being himself, and learning new things, reading books, and so on, he would eventually meet the friends that he would actually be happy with, and have a great time. And instead of going to meet them out of fear of being left alone, he would go to meet them out of the anticipation of the pleasure of interacting with them, and learning from them, and growing with them.

And finally, the person who is in the wrong profession, whose business is doing great, but he’s never really wanted to do that. He didn’t want to do agriculture, he always wanted to do international cultures. Well if he realises that it’s never too late, and he just goes and studies again, even at the age of 50, and learns what he actually wanted to study at the very start of his professional life, and he gets into that. Because he’s going to be doing what he actually wants to do, he’ll be driven not by fear but by pleasure, he will eventually find his own new career, maybe new business, new opportunities, in that space, in the space that he wanted to get into, in international cultures.

I know it’s been quite a long episode for a Five Minute Friday, already like 15 minutes or something, and just kind of like the takeaway here is that, always think for yourself, are you doing what you want or not, at any given point in time? For example, if you don’t want to go to work tomorrow (tomorrow’s Saturday). But if you don’t want to go to work on Monday, don’t go to work on Monday. If you don’t want to go to work on Tuesday, don’t go to work on Tuesday. If you don’t want to go to work on Wednesday, well maybe you’re in the wrong job. If you’re not going there because you want to go there, then maybe you should be looking for a different job. And I often hear people – I was talking to an Uber driver just recently, and he’s like, “I’ve done 8 years, I really want to start my own business, but if I get to 10 years, then I get long service leave.” This is a thing in Australia where after 10 years at a company, you get long service leave, and that means they pay you out some extra money, or they give you 3 months paid annual leave just as a bonus, as long as you get to that 10 years mark. So “I’ve got to really hold out these 2 more years even though I hate my job, and so on. But I don’t hate it. It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s not really what I want to be doing, but I’ve got to feed the family. I really want to work on my own business, but I don’t have the time, so I’ll just stick out these two years.”

And as he was saying that, I was thinking about exactly this book. Man, you’re doing not what you want to be doing. You’re not going to be happy. You’re going to waste these two years of your life. And he just wants to stick it out for another two years in order to get that long service leave, and then he might start his own business, or something like that. And it doesn’t only boil down to work, and things like that, or marriage. Think about day to day circumstances. Like you’re supposed to meet up with somebody, do you actually really want to meet up? Or do you want to call them and say hey, no, actually, today I want to do this. Or you’re in a relationship, and it’s very vivid in relationships, because people are often afraid of losing the other person, more importantly they are afraid of becoming alone. So another person has expectations of you doing something specific in a relationship, I don’t know, like going somewhere, or meeting somewhere, or talking about something, or doing something together. But you don’t actually want to do it. You know, sometimes – he also delves into compromises. Relationships, a lot of people say they have to have compromises. In reality, they don’t really have to have compromises. Because if there’s a compromise, it means you’re doing something you don’t want to do. But if you love the other person so much, even doing something that you’re not used to doing, or you’re not a fan of doing, you will want to do it because you’re not doing it out of fear that the other person will leave you or be unhappy or be upset with you, you’re doing it out of the anticipation that you want to make them happy. You want to do it because you want to do it not for yourself, but you want to make them happy, and that will make you happy. In that kind of relationship, there are no compromises. That word doesn’t even exist. You can’t define it because you’re just doing what you want all the time. Still, there will be times and things that you really don’t want to do, you just don’t do them. Just do what you actually want to do. And that way, people who don’t understand your position, and who don’t understand why – to them it might seem that you’re being selfish or something else, who don’t understand why you want to live your life the way you want to live your life, and enjoy it, they will just go out of your life. And make space and room for people who will understand that, and who will be by your side when you’re doing what you want to do. And it’s better to – the way I think about it is lay that as the ground rule in your life. The basis, the foundation, upon which you build your life. If that’s a caveat – that’s the ground zero. You’re always doing what you want. Then, on top of that, then you build the right people in your life. Then you build the right jobs. Then you build the right relationships. Then you build the right thing. Then everything will feel right. Because by default, you’re always doing what you want.

If you do it the other way round, like most of us, initially, we’re brought up doing it the wrong way round. We first build the people, we build the jobs, we build the relationships in our lives, and then we adjust our behaviour to fit all those things. And it’s like building a house upside down. We build the roof, and then on top you put the walls, and on top you put the foundation. No, you need to lay the foundation. If you lay the correct foundation, which – that foundation, when you’re doing what you want, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness, but it’s an absolutely necessary component of your happiness and fulfillment. And if you have that as your foundation, you are much more often going to enjoy life, and it’s going to be much easier to build a life where you’re enjoying yourself most, if not all, of the time. When you’re having fun, you’re with the people that you love, you’re in the relationships that fulfil you, you’re doing the jobs that you love, you’re having the adventures and holidays that you really want to do. And you’re always doing what you want to do.

So there we go, quick Five Minute Friday 20 minute episode! I hope you enjoyed that, and even if you don’t get a chance to read the book, possibly because I don’t think it’s been translated to English, although I don’t know, hopefully you can get a takeaway from there. Something to think about this weekend. Next time you’re doing something, this weekend, or maybe you already have plans for this weekend, just ask yourself. Do you really want to do that? Or are you doing it for someone else? Maybe it’s the time to say no and change the plans. Alright, I’ll leave you at that. Looking forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.