Your Life Gets Better When You Know What You Don’t Want

Matthew Gottesman (0:02)

Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to episode 897, your life gets better when you know what you don't want. Your life gets better when you know what you don't want. Knowing what doesn't fit can be just as valuable as knowing exactly what does. Now, often times you ask people like, what do you want, what do you want, what do you want? And sometimes you can answer, you know, and I think it's also a good idea to have an answer, or at least an idea of what you would want, of course. But sometimes it's missing context. Sometimes you're still unsure. Sometimes you're still needing to gather data. I say some of the best data is knowing what you don't want, right? And I mean, this, I think, starts from a very young age, right? There's a lot of pressure to know what you want, what career, where do you want to live, you know, the relationships, or for my entrepreneurial friends out there, you know, what kind of business are you building or want to build, you know, future, tell me about the 10-year plan, what's going to happen, all the things. Sometimes we don't have the answers yet. But at each stage, what we do have and collect is experience, right? And so what I mean by that is I made a few points here, that we've lived enough life to know what drains us or what environments maybe just weren't right for us, or made us smaller or not even smaller, just like, you know, we're making it, having it, helping us thrive, you know? What kinds of work we don't want to spend another decade doing, that's a big one. What dynamics we don't want in our relationships, what pace we can't sustain, what version of success looked good from the outside, but didn't actually feel like the life we wanted. This applies no matter what age you are, right? And so knowing what we don't want is doesn't get, I think the credit it deserves sometimes. You know, clarity doesn't always come from, from discovering what we want. A lot of times it's coming from knowing what we don't want to build a life around or just what doesn't work. So in this episode, let's explore several things. One, why knowing what you don't want is a legitimate form of clarity. Some of you are nodding yes or no, because you already know where I'm going to go on a lot of these, especially in your work and your relationships and living, all the things, right? I also want to talk about how experience teaches through contrast. It just does in every area of our life. Also, why eliminating what doesn't fit can make decisions easier, and we know this. Now, if you keep repeating the same patterns, that's on you to understand why. You know, what are you repeating in your life that keeps getting the same outcomes? Because if you know something like, oh, I don't want this, okay, then like, what are you still doing that's similar to how you got it before?

And I also want to talk about the difference between discernment and becoming closed off, right? Because we want to be discerning. Let's take the expression, we want to build motes, not walls. Motes you can still cross with the right tools, with the right bridge, with the right things, you know. Also, why your definition of what fits will continue changing as you do, because you are always evolving, you are always becoming spiritually mature, you're always spiritually maturing, you're always character is maturing, your emotional maturation, all these areas, right? So let's jump into the first one. Knowing what you don't want is still knowing something. You do not need the entire answer to have useful clarity. A few notes I made here, which is we tend to dismiss negative clarity because it doesn't give us a perfect picture of what comes next. So when you ever say like, what do you want? Like, I don't know, but I know what I don't want this. You're like, cool, that's good. It's not a bad thing.

The thing is, is like whether in your work, your relationships, your friendships, whatever it might be, right? Any area or your health journey or financial journey, whatever it is in all things, when you know something hasn't worked or doesn't feel good, don't repeat it. But look at it. Like actually, you know, have a quick reflection within, say, okay, what can I do differently next time or even right now? Right? So knowing what you don't want is great, so you don't repeat it.