Unknowingly, I’ve become an unhappy person in the past few weeks.
Not in a depressed way, but a feeling of dissatisfaction with where I am and what I’ve done so far in life. I then chanced upon a podcast from Naval Ravikant, a tech entrepreneur, who mentioned the following:
Desire is a contract we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want.
As humans, it’s natural to have desires. But he argues more reflection can be done about the number of desires we have. The universe is rigged in a weird way, where if you only want one thing, it will give you that.
Having several unresolved desires at a single point in time will make us infinitely unhappy. Between 2 people who have 100 and 1 desire with finite energy, it seemed the latter person would have a better chance to succeed.
I hypothesised my recent source of unhappiness stemmed from a series of unfulfilled desires. They were fueled unconsciously as I didn’t have a complete picture of them in the first place.
My solution was to:
- Write all my desires down with no judgments
- Rank them from 1–10 (or more)
- Suspend my desire to achieve not-as-important desires
- Focus on the top 3 desires
- Take small action steps towards achieving it every single day
It didn’t make me elated, but peaceful instead. I was clear and had a plan — and that beats being unhappy.
Naval advocates for people to only completely focus on a few desires, and I’ve narrowed it to 3 for now:
- To have a kick-ass website demonstrating what I can offer to the world to help in both video content & paid marketing
- Publish 4 YouTube videos every month
- Publish 8 short medium articles every month.
It’s not a crime to have desires, but being more intentional about what we’re willing to be unhappy about while attempting to resolve it consciously made me happier in 30 minutes.
I hope it can do the same for you too :)
