Between the expression "I want" and the statement "I choose" there is a distance of about a hundred kilometres.
And that is roughly the blue and realistic ocean stretching between what you feel and what you decide.
Frankly, it is such a basic and such an effective insight about life that I genuinely feel stupid repeating it.
I wouldn't waste your time on this principle if I didn't keep running into the human suffering caused when we miss the abyssal difference between "I want" (ugh) and "I choose" (excellent).
Here's something provocative — most people hardly ever make decisions.
Decisions are like sex: people talk about them about fifty times more than they actually do them.
When a person chooses, genuinely chooses, something new, dramatic and significant happens in his life.
Let me clarify the point:
When a human being makes a choice — that is, decides — he is in fact saying that along the way he has defined for himself two super-important things:
1. What he is giving up.
2. What he intends to achieve fully, and what things he will achieve only partially. In slightly less tedious phrasing, he sets an order of priorities.
Anything else, any stupid fantasy from the "I want both and both" party, is a serious example of living in a movie.
And in a foolish world that urges you morning and evening to "follow your dreams" or "realise yourself," we create a situation in which we lie again and again to young people, and to everyone else seeking change and aspiring to develop.
We lie to them about the essence of this thing called "choice," and we lie to them about the real meanings of that sexy act, "decision."
Why do we do it?
Well, we sell ourselves lies day after day, because the basic regularity of a happy human existence is hard for us to digest.
What do I mean? That we want to achieve everything and aren't willing to give up anything.
We aren't even willing to enter a discussion that so much as begins to hint that we may need to compromise a little in our relationship, that perhaps we need to bend a little and cut back our career fantasies a little.
And the first result is that we don't choose.
And the second result is that we are miserable. We are not a happy generation. Ask the statistics.
Go now to the mirror. Look into it. Take a breath. Quietly. With nobody watching. And now say to yourself, in a whisper or a shout:
"If I want to achieve something significant in this world, I have to come to terms with the fact that I shall not achieve everything."
And it will hurt. Enormously. But it means you have started to choose.
Keep taking that prescription for two years in half a glass of water and I imagine something wonderful will happen to you.
You will discover that you have become stronger.