If I asked you what problem you’re solving at work, you’d give me a masterclass.
Risks. Tradeoffs. Dependencies. Stakeholders. All the things.
You can think your way through chaos with impressive precision.
But if I asked what you really want from your work?
Suddenly, you’ve got nothing.
Not because the answer isn’t there.
But because the moment the true answer showed up, your analytical brain stepped in and immediately began negotiating against it.
That’s the trap.
Nobody had to stop you.
You did that all by yourself.
You Already Know
You didn’t go quiet because your mind went blank and you’re not sure what to say.
You went quiet because something showed up for you right away, but you immediately shot it down. You know what it is, but it feels impractical.
You may not know the exact shape of it yet. But you know the direction. You know what gives you energy. You know what you keep circling back to. You know what you dismiss too quickly because it would make your life inconvenient. You know, but pretend you don’t.
You’ve thought about it a great deal already. You ran the numbers, remembered the mortgage, pictured the look on a few specific faces, and filed it under “I’ll do it someday.”
That’s not someone who lacks clarity about what they want. That’s someone who buried their head in the sand to avoid dealing with the implications.
Clarity Is the Safe Complaint
So why do smart people like you keep insisting they “just need more clarity”?
Because it’s a magnificent alibi.
“I don’t know what I want” is a thinking problem. Something that is solvable by doing more analysis. That response buys you time, along with a very safe set of next steps. Ones that don’t involve failure. Read another book, take another assessment, journal on it some more while you figure it all out. It sounds responsible.
“I know what I want and I’m scared to go after it” doesn’t sound responsible at all. It sounds more like avoidance. It puts the whole thing squarely on you.
So instead of being truly honest with yourself, you reach for the safe version that lets you off the hook. You call it getting clarity. You turn it into a research project. Your research will never end, because finishing it would mean admitting there was never anything to research.
You knew enough to start. You just didn’t want to admit what starting would demand from you.
The Cage You Created. And Keep Yourself In.
So why won’t you give yourself permission?
Because going after what you actually want is going to be a massive pain in the ass.
The lane you’re in is paved, well-lit, and approved by your family and peer group. It’s socially acceptable. You know how it works, you’re good at it, nobody asks you to explain yourself. It’s comfortable. That’s the whole reason you’re still in it.
What you actually want comes with none of that supporting infrastructure.
It comes with a price, and the price is high: you’d have to stop being only the guy you’re known for. The dependable one. The safe pair of hands. The one everyone turns to when things need to get done.
You don’t have to kill that guy, but you do have to stop letting him run your whole damn life.
I know this pattern well. I’ve spent years running my own wants through those same cultural filters.
- is it practical?
- how would I make enough to live if I do this?
- what will people think?
- can this even work out long-term somehow?
I kept quietly putting aside the dreams that didn’t meet the criteria. I did this with my writing. With coaching. With the idea of building something outside the institutional track I’d invested years in mastering. Not because I didn’t want those things, but because wanting them made my current life harder to justify.
Until I finally realized that I was the one in control of my life, that I didn’t need anyone else’s permission or approval to build what I wanted to build. That I was not only free to design and create the life I wanted for myself, but that I was obligated to.
You’ve been unconsciously filtering your list of wants with filters provided by others.
- Your parents.
- Industry norms.
- Your peer group.
- Whatever you decided “success” meant when you were twenty-five and didn’t know any better.
You’ve been running everything through this set of filters for so long now, you aren’t even aware you’re doing so.
You probably didn’t build every bar of the cage you’re in. Some of those bars were handed to you. Some were inherited. Some were installed before you even understood you had a choice.
But you’ve been maintaining it, furnishing it, and decorating it to your taste.
And at some point, maintenance becomes consent.
Which means you’re the one holding the door shut, calling it safety.
And maybe it is safe.
But at some point, you have to ask whether you want a life that protects you from pain, or one that still has room for the things that make you feel alive.
What It Actually Costs
I’ll keep this part short, because you already know all this too.
You keep the title and steady pay, in exchange for all those years of your life.
You remain “successful,” but need to numb yourself a little more each quarter. Your wants don’t disappear, you just push them down deeper inside, pretending you’ll do them “someday,” while knowing you probably won’t.
- You notice yourself resenting people who are doing cool things, because they remind you that you’re not.
- You mock your own hopes before anyone else can.
- You start calling your desires childish because resignation feels more adult.
- You become fluent in explaining why your real life has to wait.
That’s the deal you sign every time you choose to stay in the work you don’t want to be doing. It’s a slow enough murder of your dreams that you don’t ever feel guilty about it.
Make the Forbidden Visible.
Try this. It takes a few minutes and a piece of paper.
Set a timer for 12 minutes. Write down everything you want. Not just the things that are realistic or responsible. Everything — the money, the work, where you’d live, who you’d be with, what you’d build, what you’d quit, what you’d finally say, and who you’d finally say it to. Don’t edit. The second you catch yourself asking whether something’s practical, that’s the filter talking. Write through it.
This isn’t to help you invent a desire from scratch. It’s to drag the truth onto the page where it can stop hiding behind your excuses. This is about removing the last bit of plausible deniability.
When the timer goes off, read back through and mark each item:
- Alive — it gives you energy just writing it down.
- Approved — it sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t really light you up.
- Borrowed — it’s somebody else’s; you just inherited it.
- Forbidden — it scares you, because admitting it would change something.
The Approved items are noise. The Borrowed ones were never yours to begin with. The gold is in Alive and Forbidden. And most of the time they’re the same damn item. Which is exactly why you buried it.
Now You’re On the Hook
Now you’ve got an engineering problem to solve.
It’s in your own handwriting. The thing you want, sitting there in the Alive-and-Forbidden column, where you can’t keep pretending that you don’t know what it is.
The list doesn’t fix the problem. It’s not supposed to. All it does is take away the excuses.
And that’s the good news, even if it doesn’t feel like good. If you’re the one who locked the cage, you’re also the one who can open it. The same willpower you’ve been using to keep the door shut can be used to open it.
If You’re Staring at a Forbidden Item Right Now
If you’re staring at a Forbidden item right now, stop analyzing it to death.
You can’t journal your way into courage. Nor can you reverse-engineer your way out of wanting what you want.
At some point, all that analysis stops being a reflection exercise and becomes a fork in the road. A time to decide and to act.
If you’ve named the thing, but your analytical brain is glitching out trying to build a bridge toward it without blowing up your financial stability, let’s talk.
I run a 90-minute strategy call for people sitting at that exact fork.
A straight conversation about the wants you finally admitted to yourself, what they might cost, and how to move toward them without detonating everything you’ve built.
Link below. 👇🏻