How To Work Out What You Want To Want From Life - Kyle Eschenroeder - #189

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, people in Podcast Land. Welcome back. My guest today is Kyle Eschenroeder, and we are talking about his fantastic blog post, What Do You Want To Want? I stumbled upon this at the start of the year and was just totally blown away. Working out what you want to want is the most important fundamental thing that you have to do in your life. We do not want to live a life of regret, and if we're not careful, we can quite easily end up at a place in life that we didn't really want to be or mean to get to. If you follow your default desires, societal norms, your evolutionary heritage, the programming that you've got, the way you've dealt with your traumas in the past, this is what's in store for you. You will be buffeted by the wind of life, just like a kite in the breeze. So today we are learning why and how we need to step into our programming and actively design our direction in life. I adore this topic. And considering it's a subject area that I literally didn't know existed before I read Kyle's blog posts, it's amazing. I really, really hope that you enjoy this episode and take a lot away from it. You need to go and check the actual blog post out as well. It's a 60 minute read, but it's wonderful. So linked in the show notes below. Go and enjoy it. Thank you to everyone for the feedback about Modern Wisdom University. I'm blown away by that. Again, just the support from everyone on this show is beyond anything that I've ever had before. So thank you so much. The other thing I wanted to say was, I haven't asked for this for a while, but if there's an episode that you've enjoyed recently over the last few weeks or months, please send it to a friend. The only way that this podcast grows is if you refer it to other people. You probably started listening to Modern Wisdom because someone told you, hey, you should check out this guy from the north of the UK. You should see his podcast is not that bad. So be that person for me. If you can send it to someone or throw it in a group chat, just find the link, share it to someone. That is the best way that you could repay me. And it helps to keep growing, which means I can continue to access more and more weird and wonderful guests. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Kyle Eschenroeder.
Kyle Eschenroeder in the building. How are you doing, man?

**Kyle Eschenroeder** (2:37)
Very well, how are you?

**Chris Williamson** (2:39)
Very, very well indeed. I'm happy to have you on. It's been a long time coming. First and foremost, for the listeners that don't know who you are, why do you think that I'm speaking to you today? Why do you think I reached out?

**Kyle Eschenroeder** (2:53)
Oh man, that's a very good question.
You may have had a lapse in judgment. No, actually, I think it's an interesting time. I know you found this article about asking ourselves the question, what do we want to want? It has a lot to do with re-evaluating our values and our desires. I think a lot of us are being forced to do that throughout this COVID situation. So it's kind of a good time to talk about that and see if we might be able to do it in a more strategic or skillful way.

**Chris Williamson** (3:40)
I think you've answered my reasons pretty accurately there, man. Yeah, I stumbled across your blog post, what do you want to want on your blog? And I was blown away, man. It's a 60-minute read or so and I absolutely adored it. And I was 10 minutes in and I was already scouring around online trying to find your email address and it turned out that you already followed me on Twitter, which made everything an awful lot easier. So yeah, I have got you on because I just want to go through this blog post. It's one of the most fundamental concepts that I've never heard spoken about before.
And I think there's an awful lot of people listening. I know a ton of audience members who will really benefit from this. So that's why we're here. We're going to go through it. So first things first, why is working out what you want to want important?

**Kyle Eschenroeder** (4:46)
Mostly because you don't want to live a life that you regret at the end of it, right?
I think that when we follow our default desires, we're much more likely to find ourselves at a place in life that we didn't really want to or mean to get to. So I think that's kind of the big one. But there's a lot of things along the way. It's not like that can benefit from asking ourselves this question. So actually, I knew we were going to talk about this, so I kind of pulled some of my favorite quotes from the article that I think emphasize some of these points better than I could.