Let me tell you a story about a man. This man was the engineer that I sat next to at my first job out of college. We’ll call this man Arnie, mainly because that was his name, but also because it sets the gives you a mental image for who we are dealing with. Arnie had been an engineer longer than I had been alive, and I remember him always saying two things:
This shit is so cool…You kids have it so easy…
This was about the 3D modeling software that we used and how it was much easier and more powerful than things were back in the day when everything was drawn by hand on the literal board. The other thing he always said was:
Ya Gotta Wanna.
This latter quote is the one that I want to focus on. Ya gotta wanna. For Arnie, you either wanted to do something in life, or you didn’t. When someone would come in complaining about some task at hand and how they couldn’t do it, Arnie would always respond with, “Ya gotta wanna.”
If you really want something in life, you will do it. If you don’t want something in life, you won’t. A simple concept with far-reaching implications.
So often in life, you hear people talking about time management. Oh, if I just got better managing my time, I would get these things done. It has nothing to do with time management, it has everything to do with priority management. You spend time on what you want to spend time on. Whatever is most important to you, you will do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the most important thing to me used to be youtube videos, but boy did I spend a lot of time doing that and avoiding the things I needed to do.
Let me crank this up a notch and make things really uncomfortable, if there is something in your life you are dissatisfied with, it is your fault. You are 100% responsible. Your life is exactly the way that you want it, or else you would have done something by now to change it.
So, ya gotta wanna. What does this mean for us? I think that we are all content talking about the wanna. I wanna lose weight, I wanna put my phone down more, I wanna save money and pay off debt. These are all things that we talk about, but what are we actually doing? We have to move to the gotta. What are the things that I gotta do to accomplish my goals and what does it look like to live out of the gotta?
I know that to lose weight, I gotta eat a balanced diet, be conscious of my intake, and focus on intermittent fasting. This puts substance behind the wanna.
So how do we move past the wanna and live out of the gotta? Megan just asked me this question the other day, what does it look like to live in the gotta? For me, it’s defining with crystal clarity what it is that I want. After I get all of those things down, I can put together a list of which of these make the most sense to pursue right away and which of them are a dream for another time.
For me, the gotta looks like action. It is easy to dream. It is easy to learn. It is comfortable to sit and think. It’s uncomfortable to try. Going for it is risky. It’s not normal to push beyond your comfort and go for something that you actually want.
Like I said in a previous post, I want to look back on my life and be filled with emotion looking at all of the “Dids” and not filled with regret looking at what I should have done. It’s fun thinking about the wanna and, it often feels good looking at what we wanna improve on. It’s also safe and doesn’t actually move the needle forward. I am a dreamer and unapologetically optimistic, but we have to, I have to, live in the gotta. What does it look like to live in the gotta? I’m not quite sure, but I’m going to go do something about it and figure that out.