Do You Know What You Want?

Greg Fullerton

“I’m living on a one-way, dead-end street, and I don’t know how I got there.” -Steven Wright

Like many of us, my dad, rest his soul, wasn’t always the best communicator.

I remember him working on the car one time. I was 9 or 10 years old and he’d asked me to help him. He was under the car and all I could see of him was his legs.

There were about 30 tools laying around on the ground. Once in awhile his arm would shoot out from underneath and he’d point in a general direction and bark, “Hand me that.”

Confused, I’d say, “Well, what?”

“That! That!” he’d shout with his finger waving.

So I tried to guess what he was pointing at and hand him something. Then he’d weave a complex and entertaining verbal tapestry, roll out from underneath the car, and put his finger an inch away from the tool: “That! That!”

This went on for hours. I get a kick out of it now thinking, “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just tell me exactly what tool you wanted?”

But how many of us do that same thing in business and life?

We feel frustrated and discontented because we can’t seem to get what we want — but either we don’t really know what we want, or we don’t communicate effectively.

Mark Twain said:

“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.”

Everyone goes around saying they want to be happier, or they want more money, or they want to be fulfilled.

But what do any of those things mean? How can you fulfill desires when you can’t even specify what you want?

We fail as business leaders when we can’t communicate to our team members what they should do to be successful.

“Well what should I do? How do I become successful at this business?”

“Do that.”

“What’s that?”

“That! That!”

It doesn’t work well. We’ve got to be more specific. “Make a list of 30 people. Contact them and invite them to sit down with you for 30 minutes.”

The more clearly we define what we want, the easier it is to get it and the better we can communicate with and serve others.

As Jessie Belle Rittenhouse wrote:

“I bargained with Life for a penny
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;
For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have gladly paid.”