What do you desire?

”  What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? Let’s suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, “Well, we are getting out of college and we have the faintest idea of what we want to do”. So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” Well, its so amazing as a result our of kind of educational system crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters”, “We’d like to be poets”, “We’d like to be writers”. But as everybody knows we can’t earn any money that way. Another person says, “I’d like to live an out of doors life and ride horses”. I said, “You want to teach in a riding school? Lets go through with it. What do you want to do?” When we finally got down to something in which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him “you do that and forget the money”. Because if you say that getting the money is the  most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing that a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you are doing it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good feel for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody is interested in everything. Anything you can be interested in you will find others will. But it is absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on spending things you don’t like doing things you don’t like to teach your children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing is we are bringing up children to educate them to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same things. It never gets there. So therefore it is so important to consider this question. “What do I desire?” ”

– A. W.