One of the fascinating things in life is how many ways we have to describe what we want to do.

It can be a vision, a mission, a goal, an objective. It can be our purpose, or why we do the things we do. For some it is the outcome they look for or the results they want to achieve. It can also be a dream or it can simply be what we want.

None of these are easy to determine. That is for most people.

And there are some good reasons to it.

Maybe the most obvious obstacle is when people assume that it should be easy to answer the question “what do you want?”

Depending on how or where people grew up, they have been subject to a lot of recommendations. There are the many “you should” ideas. Often shared by people who have a dream themselves and somehow hope that others take it up. Then there are the “you can’t” feedbacks. These have often been shared by people who fear failure and want to prevent others from failing.

However, that is not how the recipient experiences them. Depending on the relationships, they can become limitations or obligations. In which case the imaginable options will have been reduced.

But as the desire itself will not have totally disappeared, the answer to the question “what do you want?” remains troubled. It is there but expressing it would go against the accepted limitations or obligations. The answer remains hidden in something abstract.

A reason to keep it at that level often will be another limitation: the desire to be right. That’s when failing is not imaginable, or when succeeding comes as a must. Even more so, when the expectation is to be able to deliver a ready-made answer.

Truth is, that someone who finds an answer to this question that can be successfully implemented has been doing a lot of work.

That someone has an answer but doesn’t start doing the work is a signal, that more work needs to be done. That is, there still is some data missing. Consequently, the alignment between one’s perceived reality and one’s desires has not been achieved.

Getting started may still be the best solution. However, in that case, it helps if the answer to “what will you do?” also describes how the thing being started will assist in answering “what do you want?”

The doing enables an experience. The objective to find an answer to “what do you want?” guides how the doing is selected and then how it will be experienced.