Stop Making What Other People Want

And start making what it is you truly want to exist in the world.

“This program brought me to life again,” Anthony said to me on the call.

Chills moved through my body as he spoke, as I felt the gratitude and appreciation coming through his voice.

“I was feeling hopeless, without life. And now, I can see a path to action. I can see love. I can celebrate myself. I can see hope,” he added. “In reconnecting with my desire, I reconnected with my soul.”

His words seeped into my heart and brought tears to my eyes. A few weeks ago, I’d decided to follow up with everyone who’d finished the first 4-week-long Mastering Desire program, to get their feedback and reflections. And Anthony had been the first call of three that day.

I had my second call with a woman in Texas, a men’s coach who’d been hustling on revenue for years and getting tired of it. She thanked me for helping her connect with the deeper desire for safety in her body and to a higher purpose and to God in the course. She’d realized that no amount of revenue chasing could get her those things, and for the first time in a while, gave herself permission to take a month off to reset and re-evaluate what she truly wanted in business and in life.

And then there was the husband, father of four, engineer, and self-proclaimed “achievaholic” who shared that, through the course, he finally tapped into a deep sense that he didn’t need to do any particular thing to be worthy of being loved. And it’s opened up so much more possibility and freedom in how he wants to take bigger risks and live from the heart.

The heartfelt reflections were one the most beautiful showers of love I’ve experienced (I tear up even as I write this) — and I had trouble letting all the love in.

Energy titillated through my body afterwards. I resisted the overwhelming energy for a while, until I finally remembered a pointer from my teacher Joe Hudson to let myself feel the overwhelm. I paused and cried on my couch for an hour — gut-wrenching cries from the depth of my belly — as I let in the reality of what had happened. I felt so proud and overwhelmed with joy by the impact that I’d let myself create.

For four weeks, my co-leader Katara and I had let ourselves be immersed in the lives, challenges, joys, inner worlds, celebrations, and tears of everyone’s journeys — sharing everything we’d learned about connecting with and living from our soul’s deepest desires. At one point, I’d even caught myself leaning out and made a conscious choice to let myself dream big — to let myself care so much about creating a life-changing program that it would break my heart if I failed.

On the other side of those tears on the couch, I felt for the first time, in a very deep way, that my soul truly belonged in the universe.

I’ve spent so much of life trying to contort myself to fit into the world. And I’d finally found the me-shaped-puzzle-piece hole in the world that I was meant to slot into.

I’d birthed a program that truly captured my life experiences, my philosophies, and my essence, and I was being reflected how my life’s work was changing people’s lives. I’d been yearning for so long in my professional life to create a life-changing impact that would be deeply transformational — and here it was, being reflected back to me. In putting myself fully out there, I felt wanted and supported by the universe in a way that I’d never felt before.

And it all started from a decision to depart from the conventional advice and to create something that I really wanted to exist in the world.

Make What You Truly Want

Conventional advice says to “make something people want.” Popularized by Paul Graham in the startup community, it’s well-intentioned guidance. It makes sure that what you’re creating is actually solving a problem that people have.

Conventional advice also says to “meet them where they are.” When I studied with Ramit Sethi on how to build online courses, he placed significant emphasis on spending time in the online watering holes where your target demographic lingers — reddit, Quora, Twitter, etc. — to get a sense of their problems. The thinking was that starting from a real problem meant that I’d make something that could be scaled into sustainable income.

After I left tech two years ago, I spent much of my time following their advice and orbiting questions of what people might want that would align with my own interests.

I interviewed people in the market about men’s groups and people’s desire for connection. I coached tech leaders and managers because people wanted it, were willing to pay for it, and because I kicked ass at it. I studied other people’s transformational programs to see what else was out there.

But whenever I started with the question, “What do people want?” something always felt missing from the answers.

The answers would keep pointing me to creating the practical thing that people wanted — something that I’ve done for so much of my life. Studying the practical college major (computer science), starting the practical career (software engineering), writing the practical book (The Effective Engineer), founding the practical company (tech leadership development).

The answers I got in my past two years of exploration — even if they were promising business ideas — were never fully the thing that I wanted to create from the depth of my soul. I’d feel the initial excitement, but at some point, the ideas would feel heavy, like work.

And I didn’t want my life’s work to feel like “work.” I wanted something more. I wanted my life’s work to feel expansive and energy-giving, to light my soul on fire. I wanted it to be something that reinvigorated me every single day. I wanted it to be something that expanded the landscape of what was possible for people in the world.

And so finally, one day earlier this year, I decided to stop looking externally for answers and to ask myself, “What does my soul want to create? What wants to be created through me?"

When I shifted my awareness back to myself and what I wanted rather than what others wanted, something clicked. I connected with a deep desire for what I wanted to exist in the world: an experience that would create deep personal transformation for anyone going through it. And given that reconnecting with the feeling of deep desire within myself and building a healthy and secure attachment to my own desires had played such a pivotal role in my own journey — it made sense that an experience around desire itself would be the most powerful thing I could create.

I let myself create the program that I wanted to exist — the transformational program that I’d put myself through.

Every meditation I led and recorded in the course was something that I felt excited to guide myself through — and that when I did, led to my own powerful breakthroughs in my relationship and my dreams during the course.

Every exercise I led with Katara was one that I felt eager to take myself through — and that when I did, created clarity in my own life, around fatherhood, the book I’m writing, and more.

I created the experience that I would take myself through again and again to get in touch with the magic of my desires.

Because the journey of creating the course itself was so spiritually expansive, I felt the freshness and aliveness in every transmission we made. What we created was what I felt most excited about existing in the world.

What I didn’t know was that the journey would also bring me a deeper sense of true belonging in the world.

The Quest for True Belonging

True belonging can only happen when we live, express, and create from the depths of our heart and soul.

It’s a deeply vulnerable thing and also the only path toward feeling truly at home in the world. It requires honoring your truth so deeply that you’re willing to stand alone.

Brené Brown writes in Braving the Wilderness:

"True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness… [I]t requires you to be who you are.”

I’ve received heartfelt reflections on my work contributions before but the reflections from this program felt fundamentally different.

As long as I was creating something out there for someone else, any reflection that I received was ultimately partly for and about that thing.

And no matter how much energy I put a thing out there, I would never have been able to receive reflections that touched the depth of my soul and my essence because that wasn’t where those creations were ultimately born from.

Previous reflections circumnavigated the spot but never scratched the itch of my soul.

Recently, I just finished the Write of Passage bootcamp, where for 5 weeks we were guided and supported to “write the essay only you could write.” As I experienced myself and other writers excavate from their life experiences and pour their hearts and souls onto the page, I felt a similar vibration. The deeper we went into ourselves to find the core idea that we were here to share with the world, the deeper we’d all feel that sense of true belonging — that our essence, our ideas, and our authentic expression all mattered.

The only way to create the powerful experience of our souls truly belonging in the universe was to start and express directly from a place deep within ourselves, from the deepest and most authentic desire we have in our being.

It’s left me with a new perspective on creatorship and a new understanding of what it means to create for myself. The origin of creative work that’s most alive has to originate from inside us, not externally from what people want.

And so create from what you truly want — not what you think someone else wants.

Create for yourself — because even if no one else wants it, you’ll have honored yourself in making it.

Create for yourself — make it a deep expression of your soul, of what you think is missing from the world.

Create for yourself — because it’s the most vulnerable and self-loving thing you can do.

I say create, but this applies generally to how we live life as well. Because what is life but an experience created from our thoughts, emotions, and actions?

When we live from what others want or expect of us, we’ll never experience a soul-level acceptance and belonging for ourselves.

When we’re living from our deepest desires, then no matter what the outcome or what others think, we’re still living from a place where we’re honoring our truth and the way that we show up in the world.

And ironically, if we create from that place, of course people will want it, because they feel our essence in our creation. And because our essence is human, in feeling us they feel themselves.

Thank you to

Brian Basham

and

Chris Coffman

for reading early drafts of this post.

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P.S. One of my favorite teachers, Joe Hudson — the one who taught me to feel the overwhelm in the story — just opened the doors to his once-a-year The Art of Accomplishment Master Class today.

I love learning and growing — and I’ve attended several dozens of trainings in the past few years.

Joe’s course stands out as one of the most life-changing and one of the highest-ROI investments I’ve ever made. So much so, that I’m actually on my way to an in-person retreat with him in California right now.

If you’ve already achieved some level of success and have a growing sense that your accomplishments by themselves aren’t what will bring you the joy you want in life, then this course is for you.

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He’s by far one of the most masterful coaches I’ve ever worked with, and this is one of the few ways to work with him. I’ve written about my own experience in working with him before.

Applications open today, and the limited spots usually sell out quickly within a few days.

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