Until my 30th birthday (Dec 7th 2019 is the plan) I’ll be documenting some of the things I’ve learnt in my 20s. I’ll be as honest as possible within the constraints of this being a public blog!
Lesson 1: Know what you want, say what you want
“Tell me what you want, what you really really want” – Spice Girls
In her book How to get sh*t done, Erin Falconer writes a sentence that struck me: “Not saying what you mean will inevitably weaken you”.
Knowing what you want in the basic sense is easy for everyone. I want to be a billionaire, with a deeply meaningful career, make my own money and be able to support my family, have an amazing partner, an inspiring global network of friends and have several eco-lodges, and look amazingly youthful, strong and elegant, and then a bunch of other stuff that would make this sentence untenable in its length. And I want it all NOW/yesterday. The problem lies in the fact that you can’t get everything you want so you have to know what you want to pursue within the constraints of reality, which necessitates prioritization, and prioritization is hard. So quite often without prioritizing explicitly, we muddle through the years of life, not getting enough of what we really wanted.
When we don’t know what our priorities really are, we also communicate incorrectly to those around us all the time. In my 20s, I would often say things I didn’t mean to people around me like: “I don’t mind” (when I did mind), “I’m not offended” (when I was offended), “I can do it by X deadline” (when I couldn’t do it by X deadline and would then be killing myself to meet the deadline or asking for an extension and feeling guilty), and “I’ll think about it” (when I already knew the answer or was never going to think about it because it required too much courage to think about it and I didn’t have the courage in present state). There’s a lot to unpack in here, but I think fundamentally one of the core reasons we don’t say what we mean is because of a lack of clear priorities. Who’s happiness are you prioritizing? Yours or someone else’s? Who is priority at any given moment? Are you prioritizing freedom or the comfort of conformity? You can’t have it all, it comes down to priorities, and then the courage to say no to things that aren’t highest priority.
“Don’t say yes when you really mean no” – Paulo Coelho
So what I aspire to in my 30s is to a) be more conscious of my priorities b) challenge my priorities — will this stack-order of things actually make me happy? and c) communicate more clearly what I want, what I really really want
Stiletto Muse 