Knowing What You Don’t Want Isn’t the Same

Entrepreneurship begins with vision—identifying where you are going is essential before starting the journey. This is nothing new. Almost every book detailing business or personal growth has an early chapter dedicated to understanding and applying vision.

It is, however, new to students. Rather than start an entrepreneurship class by talking about vision, I have found it is easier to instead pose the following question without any context: “What do you want?”

The students must write their answers down on blank pieces of paper and the answers have, as you can imagine, a wide range. Some focus on what they want in the here and now (food, more sleep, time to scroll through TikTok) while others focus on what they want out of the semester (good grades, education).

The truth is, this is a hard question. Most people, when asked, “What do you want?” struggle with the answer—what do I want now or later? What do I want in my family or my work? What do I want overall? Usually, the reason this question is such a struggle is because we have dedicated little to no time to truly understanding what we actually do want in our lives; we have not fully considered where we are going and why.

Lately, I have noticed a trend when I pose this question to groups—more and more, the answers that I get are worded in the negative. In other words, when I ask, “what do you want?” I sometimes get answers to the question, “what do you not want?” For instance, in a recent class, I was given a few different answers of this variation: “I don’t want to be poor,” and “I don’t want to be overweight,” and “I don’t want to be lonely.”

I found this fascinating—focusing on the negative is often a default setting unless we are intentional about the positive point of view. These students, in being given the opportunity to dream as big as possible with a limitless question, limited themselves with a negative response.‍

Knowing what you don’t want is not the same as knowing what you do want.‍

If we intensely focus on what we don’t want to be true (poor, overweight, lonely), odds are good that we will never be satisfied and will often act out of fear. What you measure moves, and when you measure what you don’t want and fixate on what you don’t want, you can often ironically bring about exactly what you don’t want.

This is why it is helpful to show students how to work through their negative response to find the positive truth. As a result, I have now modified my original question—instead of “what do you want?” I now ask, “What do you want to be true in your life?” and then break it down into every area of life. “What do you want to be true in your intellectual life? In your relationships? In your physical life? What do you want to be true spiritually, vocationally, financially?”

In doing this, we preload the response to be positive. “I don’t want to be poor” becomes, “I want financial security and the freedom it brings.” “I don’t want to be overweight” becomes, “I want to be healthy in my body and mind.” “I don’t want to be lonely” becomes, “I want a life full of rich relationships.”

Once we have established this, we now have a clear destination in mind and can craft a personal growth plan to work toward that vision.

The future of education is bright indeed!

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